Communication+Strategy+Report

== = The Childhood Obesity Epidemic in Canada =

The major and overarching goal of our communication strategy project in the area of childhood obesity in Canada, deals with educating children and parents about healthy lifestyles thus preventing the future growing rates of childhood obesity in Canada. We also want to assist in changing the unhealthy habits of children and parents nationwide in order to lower high rates of childhood obesity today. We also wish to work with parents and chldren together in order to receive the best results. We hope that this will ultimately result in these children living longer and healthier lives. Our message is: make good food choices and live active for a healthy lifestyle. A significant part of our message is the fact that is it presented to such young children because the main point of our campaign is to prevent future growing rates of childhood obesity therefore the message must implemented at a young age. Our message is somewhat broad and general and thus must be portrayed in detail in radically different ways in order to reach and truly speak to our two very different target audiences. Our message is being targeted to two main groups; young children, ages 2-6 and parents of young children roughly between the ages of 25-40. (Details following) Our main target audience is all children aged approximately 2-6. Studies show that childhood obesity begins as young as age two. We have chosen this young age demographic of children because we thought that it is extremely important to start children on the path to a healthy lifestyle as young as possible so that they can learn these lessons early on and apply them throughout their lives. Targeting very young children also is the best possible way to prevent obesity at the very beginning of the child’s life. The young children we are targeting are both males and females. The majority of them attend school and are either in pre-school, junior kindergarten, senior kindergarten and grade 1. They enjoy watching television, especially animated cartoons, and books. They are either learning to read or can read. Finally, we are targeting very young children all across Canada. Our second, and equally as significant target audience are parents of young children. It is difficult to pinpoint a certain age bracket for these parents but ages 25-40 gives a rough idea as to who we are targeting. These parents have the ultimate responsibility to help their children and steer them on the correct path early on in life. We are targeting both mothers and fathers, and both working and non-working parents. The majority of these parents live busy lives juggling both work and family life and have little spare time. These parents we are targeting live all across Canada. For the young children we are targeting the media that would be the best for reaching them are television, and books. DVDs, commercials, books and comics are all a part of the media sources we will be utilizing to target young children across Canada. As for the adults, and parents to these children, the best means of media we can use to reach them is through the Internet, mainly e-mail, since many of these parents have jobs in which they utilize computers. Also, it would be safe to say that the vast majority of young adults today are computer literate and Internet savvy. Digital magazines (in PDF format) along with print, mailed copies of the magazines (for those parents who are not as computer savvy) will both be utilized to reach our target of parents to young children. The messages we are putting out are teaching healthy eating along with an active lifestyle to children at a very young age will lead to the prevention childhood obesity in the future. It is important that this message gets to both young children and parents of young children therefore we must deliver the message in radically different methods. We plan to team up with the government in order to have a greater reach to people. This is a subject that government agencies are already focused on greatly and we feel as though we can contribute to decreasing childhood obesity alongside them with our fresh ideas. For our young child audience we plan to create DVDs, commercials (also known as PSAs), short television episodes, books, and comics featuring animated characters designed as nutritional foods. These characters will attract and appeal to young children. (Some of these characters are featured on our wikispace, Team-er, as a sample of what these characters will look like) The program will be entitles Tom the Tomato and Friends and will feature these characters in different sitations that will be easily understood by children in our age demographic. Parents can get involved in these episodes alongside thier children by logging on to the webpage which will be further discussed later. The story lines that will be focused on will have positive messages pertaining to nutrition and active lifestyles. The story lines will also be entertaining to children to keep their attention. As for the parents of the children the message we are sending out of enforcing nutrition and active lifestyles on their young children to prevent future childhood obesity, we plan on taking a more digital approach. We plan on creating a magazine focusing directly on this topic. This magazine will mainly be available online since these parents use computers very frequently and rather have digital copies than paper copies. We also kept in mind parents who are not computer savvy, and will also have a print copy version of the magazine that can be sent out through mail. Both of the magazines will be available when signing up for the free subscription online through our website or mail in subscription. The magazine will contain content relating to nutrition for children including recipes. Also there will be many features having to do with how to get young children interested and enthusiastic about an active lifestyle and eating nutritional foods. Finally, we will also have an interactive website where people can read articles and information about this topic as well as interact with other parents.the website will also have a kids section in which parents can log on with their children to play educational games with characters from the Tom Tomato and Friends programs. The main change that we are hoping o achieve from our campaign is the lowering of the very high and rising rates of childhood obesity in Canada today. Currently 26% of children between the ages 2-17 are overweight and obese, and with our campaign we hope to significantly lower this percentage in the long term by educating very young children to better their futures. The main and most significant aspect of our campaign is the influence we hope to achieve. We want to influence children to eat better and live actively along with influencing parents to enforce healthy lifestyles on their children. If our influence is successful we will be able to see major changes in the long run in the country's children which benefits not only the children, but Canada as a nation since there will be significantly less of a strain on health care.
 * **What are we trying to achieve with this?**
 * **What is our message?**
 * **Who we are we specifically trying to target the message to?**
 * **What is our audience/target demographic?**
 * **What media is the best way to reach them?**
 * **What messages are we putting out?**
 * **What change are we trying to bring out?**
 * **What are the influences we want to bring?**