Malnutrition affects tens of millions of children worldwide. It’s easy to lose a sense of the scale of the malnutrition problem. UNICEF needed to find a way to make it feel more real and personal to those who aren’t usually thinking about it. And nothing will get a parent’s attention like an upset child at a birthday party.

Imagine if it were your child struggling to get enough food. Playing on the public’s phenomenal appetite for ‘reality’-based programming, we set up hidden cameras at a children’s party, and then hire actors to pose as employees cheerfully handing out snack boxes (ironically labeled, “Who’s Hungry?”). Inside the boxes are snacks consisting of meager, unappetizing foods and dirty water that millions of children consume in order to survive. The kids went nuts. Parents became upset. And we created a film that stresses the urgency of addressing global child malnutrition.