ABOUT

Yellow fever (YF), spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, is the “Brazilian plague,” with a kill rate equal to Ebola’s. Brazil’s current YF outbreak (with 144 confirmed deaths) is the largest since the 1980s. Malaria cases have risen 35% in one year, with 2,000 infections. Children are at risk; 86% of malaria deaths globally occur under age five.

Brazil’s Health Ministry is hard-pressed to stop the spread. A vaccine exists for YF, but the sheer size of Brazil coupled with vaccine shortages mean that widespread inoculation in remote regions could take years.

Meanwhile, topical repellents are largely unattainable and unaffordable in the Amazon, a natural mosquito breeding ground containing half of the planet’s rainforests. We approached our client Ananse, a leading chemical company that develops high-tech coatings and sealants for consumer products, with an idea to develop a new form of mosquito protection to aid the country’s most vulnerable.

So we brought to life a revolutionary idea to create a repellent in an entirely new format.

We brought the idea of creating a repellent book collection to our client Ananse, whose scientists set out to invent a repellent in a new physical form. If we could turn common physical objects into repellents, we’d be able to reinvent the entire category – and the market potential would be huge. We set our sights on first developing a book collection containing a natural repellent, with a storybook and a coloring book, along with a set of crayons and a superhero’s cape.

“Safe Stories” uses nanotechnology to create a new type of mosquito-repelling product containing a natural repellent made of citronella, clove, and neem oils.

It took almost a year to convert the formulation into a varnish that could coat book pages, the set of crayons and the superhero’s cape.
University lab testing has proven the book collection safe even when in contact with a baby’s skin. Turning the pages reactivates the repellent, creating a six-hour window of protection that extends 1-to-2 meters from the books, same for the crayons and the cape. Tests show the book effective in repelling mosquitos for up to 3 months from the time a page is first turned.

We travelled more than 4 thousand kilometers to deliver the first 2,000 collections in the community of Tapara-Miri, right in the middle of Amazon Forest, one of the poorest communities in Brazil, with no access to anything, including repellents.

The delivering reached all children of the community, that are now studying and playing with more protections to their health.
Until the end of the year, Ananse will be delivered more than 20 thousand collections.

Early Outcome / Awareness: The repellent book collection has been endorsed by Brazil’s Health Department and approved for use and distribution. It has also received the endorsement of respected leading pediatricians in Brazil and the IPAM Institute of Amazon.

So far more than 120 stories already generated in Major Media in Brazil, also more than 300 stories generated in social media, in a 4.5 million in total number of views and shares and more than 3.5 million dollars of earned media.

With the investment of only 50 thousand dollars the client Ananse achieved the biggest PR result of your lifetime.

not counting more than 14 awards including two Lions in Cannes and the Clio's.