In late 2013 the WHO put to tender the work for its World Immunization Week 2014 campaign, a mixed media, global communications campaign to educate audiences around the world of the benefits of immunizations. The 2014 campaign would need to increase awareness across numerous country, language and culture barriers as well as resonate with parents and children alike.

Gas and Flames’s idea for the campaign was to take this diverse target audience on a journey. One that would help them to understand the reasons why vaccination is important, to find out about their and their families current vaccination status, and be encouraged to get the vaccines needed. As well as creating the ‘Immunize for a healthy future’ umbrella idea Gas and Flames also devised and communicated three simple yet vital steps to follow in the immunization process. The first step, ’KNOW’, engages the target audience to know why immunizations are important. The second step, ‘CHECK’, asks that the audience confer with their local medical specialist to check which vaccines they have already had, and those they still need to get. The third step, ‘PROTECT’, encourages the audience to then go and get the vaccines they still need to protect their family and themselves.

In all, 72 visual posters were created spanning nine ‘KNOW’, ‘CHECK’ and ‘PROTECT’ scenarios in all six of the official WHO languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Chinese. An ambitious and important part of Gas and Flames’s idea was to appeal to both young and older audiences, as immunizations work at their best when all populations are immunized. To do this we worked closely with local genevois illustrator Julien de Preux whose illustrations put together with real background images opened the campaign up to a wide audience.

A public service announcement film was also created, with the skills of another local genevois animator Ridlet, bringing to life the illustrations while at the same time educating the audience about the journey of immunization.