Six years on: a pandemic campaign and lessons on the future of charitable advertising

In March 2020, with the world in the early weeks of lockdown, the UN and WHO put out a global call to creatives. They needed help communicating simple messages to limit the spread of Covid-19. They also needed to solve the challenge of reaching billions of people across dozens of languages and cultures.

At Vungle, we responded. With the support of our CEO and leadership team, I founded an initiative we called Ads for Social Good, with the intention to use our platform to help. We opened up the full capability of Vungle Creative Labs: video in multiple orientations, Combo Video ads that repurposed landscape footage into fullscreen portrait, Fullscreen Display endcards, and the interactive playable format the initiative became known for. For many of the charities we worked with, including Whale and Dolphin Conservation and SpecialEffect, it was a lifeline during a time where donations dropped. We handled everything, from raw assets to live production-ready creative.

The ads were translated into 22 languages, distributed across 50+ countries, and viewed 36.7 million times. They won Most Effective Messaging Campaign at the 2020 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards and were added to the WHO's global artwork library.

I'm proud of that work, especially at the speed with which we moved. But looking back now, six years later, what is most striking to me is how much of it depended on being in the right place at the right time. We had the tools, the team, and the pipes because we were a well-resourced ad tech company. Most organisations trying to do good in the world have none of that.

The resourcing problem in charitable advertising

A charity running a campaign on a shoestring likely doesn't have an in-house creative team. They probably don't have the production pipeline to turn a single piece of messaging into 22 language variants optimised for different devices and placements. They may only have a communications officer, a limited budget, and a lot of goodwill.

The result is that these organisations, with important things to say, are often not equipped to say them at scale. A well-funded consumer brand can saturate a market with targeted, iterated creative, which smaller charities don't have the resources to do. Structural problems like this exist for smaller charities, which generative AI is genuinely well-placed to address.

What GenAI changes

Even with ingenious, designer-led workarounds, the most time-consuming parts of creative production have historically been the parts that require human hours: writing copy variants, resizing and adapting assets for different formats, translating and localising content, generating or sourcing imagery without a photographer or illustrator in the ranks.

These are exactly the tasks that generative AI handles well right now. You don't need to relinquish your strategic thinking, or outsource the insight about what will actually move an audience. But if you are running a tight budget, executing on the work that sits between a good idea and a live campaign, can be compressed dramatically.

A charity with a clear message and a single strong creative concept could, today, use AI tools to generate copy variants across tones and reading ages, produce image assets adapted for different cultural contexts, localise into multiple languages with a human review layer on top, and reformat everything for the placements available to them.

The Ads for Social Good campaign took a team of skilled people working at pace, without Generative AI. A version of that campaign built with the tools available now could be produced by an even smaller team, faster, and at a fraction of the cost.

The part that still requires people

It's important to not to oversell this. Generative AI is a production catalyst, not your strategist, and it is not a substitute for understanding your audience.

The reason the Ads for Social Good work landed is because someone understood that an interactive format, despite its simplicity, would create a moment of agency in a period when people felt entirely powerless. That insight came from people who had spent years understanding how audiences engage with creative on mobile.

What AI enables is for smaller organisations to spend more of their limited human resource on that kind of thinking, and less of it on production execution, which should be an exciting prospect.

What I'd like to see

Six years on from that campaign, I'd like to see more of the ad tech industry asking what it would look like to make these tools genuinely accessible to the charitable sector (and not as a cynical CSR line item).

The infrastructure and models exist, but we don't yet have the will to build bridges between the capability that sits inside companies like the one I work for, and the organisations that could put it to meaningful use.

That's a conversation worth having. If you're working on it, or want to, I'd be glad to hear from you.