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Elifelet and McCann Make Hanukkah Discomfort a Message
Elifelet's 2019 digital campaign 'Children Should Enjoy Like Children,' created by McCann Tel Aviv, uses the familiar online video skip mechanic to confront Israeli audiences with the reality that refugee and asylum-seeking children cannot simply press a button to escape prolonged exposure to distressing content, making discomfort the campaign's core message.
Published in Israel in January 2019, the campaign occupies the public interest category and was archived as a single media asset, as documented by adsoftheworld.com and noted in the Clapboard archive. Elifelet — rendered in English transliteration as both Elifelt and Elifelet — is an Israeli nonprofit whose stated mission, per elifelet.org, is to reduce developmental, emotional, educational, and social gaps experienced by asylum-seeking and refugee children living in Israel. The organisation works directly with some of the most vulnerable children in the country, and the campaign was designed to translate that mission into a culturally resonant digital moment. The January 2019 release aligned the work with the Hanukkah season, a period associated in Israel with celebration, light, and the enjoyment of childhood, making the contrast between festive expectation and the lived experience of refugee children all the sharper. McCann Tel Aviv served as the creative agency of record for the campaign, bringing to bear a strategic and executional approach suited to digital distribution, though the specific platforms on which the campaign ran have not been publicly identified. The campaign carries a Clapboard Score of 60 out of 100, reflecting recognisable strategic intent and a disciplined creative concept, set against the absence of verified performance data and a limited publicly documented asset footprint.
Elifelet operates in a social context that makes its 2019 campaign both timely and structurally necessary. Israel is home to a significant population of African asylum seekers and refugees, concentrated primarily in Tel Aviv's southern neighbourhoods, according to reporting by Israel Hayom and analysis published by the Israel Policy Forum. These children grow up in conditions that contrast sharply with the lives of their Israeli peers, and awareness of their situation among the broader Israeli public has historically been limited and contested.
McCann Tel Aviv's strategic insight was precise. The agency recognised that digital video audiences in Israel, as elsewhere, exercise near-automatic agency over pre-roll and in-stream advertising by pressing the skip button within seconds of an ad beginning. The campaign inverted that reflex: by foregrounding the skip option and simultaneously depicting children who have no equivalent escape from the content that surrounds their daily lives, the creative team built a mechanism in which viewer behaviour became the message. The more naturally a viewer moved to skip, the more uncomfortably they implicated themselves in the campaign's argument. This approach places the work in a competitive creative tradition alongside internationally recognised public service campaigns that use media mechanics as content, rather than merely as distribution vehicles. Organisations such as UNICEF and Save the Children have deployed similar metacognitive strategies in adjacent markets, but within the Israeli public interest sector the approach was distinctive. The digital medium was not incidental to the strategy; it was the strategy, with the platform's own grammar — skip, watch, engage — repurposed as moral vocabulary.
Creative Director Eddie Gartsman led the campaign at McCann Tel Aviv, with Art Directors Dana Manor and Kfir Peretz shaping the visual and structural execution, and Copywriter Dor Waintrob responsible for the verbal architecture of the concept. Additional credit is attributed to Gal Sobol, as documented in the adsoftheworld.com archive listing for the campaign.
The creative concept, as described in the adsoftheworld.com and Clapboard archive records, centres on the deliberate and intentional discomfort of its premise. The campaign portrays children enduring prolonged exposure to distressing content, and does so within a digital video format that the viewer can, at any moment, choose to abandon. That choice — to skip or to stay — is not incidental set dressing; it is the conceptual engine of the piece. By designing the work around a mechanic that is so embedded in digital viewing behaviour as to be reflexive, the McCann Tel Aviv team ensured that no engagement with the ad could be neutral. Watching it through is an act of solidarity; skipping it is an act that the campaign frames as analogous to the indifference refugee children face. The single media asset documented in the archive suggests a focused, concentrated deployment rather than a multi-format campaign, which places heightened creative pressure on that one execution to carry the full weight of the brief. The craft decision to hold the campaign to a single, disciplined execution is consistent with the strategic logic: one unavoidable moment, engineered to stay with the viewer precisely because it refuses to be comfortable or forgettable.
No verified performance data for 'Children Should Enjoy Like Children' is publicly available. No reach figures, view counts, engagement metrics, donation uplift, or behavioural change data have been published by Elifelet, McCann Tel Aviv, or any third-party source, including adsoftheworld.com or Mccann Co Il. The campaign has not been identified as a winner, shortlist entry, or nominee across Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards databases.
In the absence of verified metrics, the campaign's structural effectiveness can be assessed on its own terms. The core mechanic — using the skip button as a mirror held up to viewer indifference — is one of the more intellectually rigorous approaches available to a public interest brief with limited media budget. Digital campaigns built around behavioural irony, where the act of disengaging amplifies rather than diminishes the message, have a documented capacity to generate organic conversation and secondary reach beyond paid distribution, though no such data has been confirmed for this specific campaign. The decision to anchor the work to Hanukkah, as noted in the Clapboard archive, gave the campaign a cultural hook that increases the likelihood of contextual relevance within the Israeli market. Elifelet's documented campaign output, according to adsoftheworld.com, comprises only two archived campaigns, which positions 'Children Should Enjoy Like Children' as a significant proportion of the organisation's total creative record. The Clapboard Score of 60 out of 100 reflects a campaign that demonstrates genuine strategic craft and conceptual clarity, tempered by a limited asset footprint and the absence of any independently verified impact data.
'Children Should Enjoy Like Children' is a digital public interest campaign created by McCann Tel Aviv for Israeli nonprofit Elifelet in January 2019. It uses the online video skip mechanic to confront viewers with the reality that refugee and asylum-seeking children in Israel cannot escape prolonged exposure to distressing content, making viewer behaviour central to the message.
McCann Tel Aviv created the campaign. Creative Director Eddie Gartsman led the work, supported by Art Directors Dana Manor and Kfir Peretz, Copywriter Dor Waintrob, and additional contributor Gal Sobol, as documented in the adsoftheworld.com archive. The campaign was published in Israel in January 2019 for public interest organisation Elifelet.
Elifelet is an Israeli nonprofit dedicated to reducing developmental, emotional, educational, and social gaps among asylum-seeking and refugee children, per elifelet.org. The January 2019 campaign aimed to raise awareness of these children's realities among Israeli audiences during the Hanukkah period, using digital media to reach a broad public.
No award wins, shortlists, or nominations for 'Children Should Enjoy Like Children' have been identified across Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards databases. The campaign carries a Clapboard Score of 60 out of 100, reflecting strategic clarity alongside a limited documented footprint.
McCann Tel Aviv built the campaign around the digital video skip mechanic, as documented by adsoftheworld.com. By depicting children unable to escape distressing content while giving viewers the option to skip, the agency made the act of disengagement itself part of the campaign's argument, creating a conceptual loop in which viewer behaviour mirrored the broader social indifference Elifelet works to address.
No verified performance data for the campaign is publicly available. No reach figures, engagement metrics, donation uplift, or behavioural change statistics have been published by Elifelet, McCann Tel Aviv, adsoftheworld.com, or any other named source. Structural analysis suggests the skip-mechanic concept carries inherent potential for organic reach, but no confirmed results exist.
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