How Herokid and DDB Spain Turned Children's Drawings Into Skateboards for Social Good
Herokid's 'Skateboards' campaign, created by DDB Spain and published in June 2015, is a direct public interest initiative in which children from Barcelona's Raval district drew their personal problems, and those drawings were transferred onto functional skateboards that were then sold to fund Casal dels Infants, a non-profit working with youth at risk of social exclusion.
The campaign operates on a deceptively simple mechanical premise. Children living in one of Barcelona's most socially complex urban districts were invited to articulate their anxieties and difficulties through drawing. DDB Spain then took those raw, unfiltered illustrations and had them applied to real Herokid skateboards. The children were taught to skate, turning the boards into instruments of both expression and empowerment. Additional boards featuring the artwork were made available for sale, with proceeds directed to Casal dels Infants. The result was a closed loop of social value: a child's problem becomes a skateboard, the skateboard becomes a fundraising object, and the funds return to support the community that generated the idea in the first place.
In Spain, where the public interest industry has increasingly sought participatory formats that connect audiences to lived social realities, 'Skateboards' stands as a compact but resonant example of cause-driven creativity. The campaign was classified under the Direct medium, with one primary media asset, yet its conceptual reach extends well beyond its physical footprint. By anchoring Herokid's brand identity to skateboarding's subcultural association with freedom and resilience, DDB Spain gave the initiative an authenticity that conventional charity advertising rarely achieves. The Raval district of Barcelona provided not just a setting but a living argument for the campaign's existence, grounding every creative decision in a specific, verifiable social reality.
Herokid entered this campaign as a skateboard brand with a clear cultural position. Skateboarding has long functioned in urban environments as an accessible form of self-determination for young people who lack conventional outlets, and in Barcelona's Raval district that association carries particular weight. The Raval is one of the most densely populated and socioeconomically diverse neighbourhoods in Spain, home to a significant proportion of families navigating poverty, immigration pressures, and educational disadvantage. By choosing this precise geography, DDB Spain rooted the 'Skateboards' campaign in a credible social context rather than a generalised charitable gesture.
The strategic partnership with Casal dels Infants was central to that credibility. Founded as a non-profit serving children at risk of social exclusion in Barcelona, Casal dels Infants gave the campaign institutional legitimacy and direct access to its target community. This is a meaningful structural distinction from campaigns that adopt a cause at a distance. Here, the beneficiary organisation was embedded in the creative mechanism itself, as the children it supports were the authors of the campaign's core visual content.
Within the Spanish public interest industry, campaigns of this type compete for attention and donor engagement against larger, better-funded organisations with established brand recognition. Organisations such as UNICEF Spain and Save the Children Spain operate with considerably greater media budgets, as reported by their respective annual reports, making differentiation through creative ingenuity a practical necessity for smaller initiatives. DDB Spain's decision to use a documentary-adjacent, social experiment format gave 'Skateboards' a storytelling register that those larger organisations rarely deploy at this level of intimacy. The campaign did not ask audiences to feel sympathy from a distance. It asked them to hold something a child had made and to skate on it.
Executive Creative Director José María Roca de Viñals led the DDB Spain team that produced 'Skateboards', working alongside Creative Directors Javier Meléndez, Pedro Andragnes, and Paco Cabrera. The art direction was handled by Aldo Ferreto and Ariadna Castells, with copywriting by Iratxe Cabodevilla and Tino Barreiro. Production was managed by Vicky Moñino, with Brigitte Villalonga serving as Traffic Director. The account was managed by Esther Serrano under Account Director Javier Villalba Menéndez, with Gorka Lozano serving as Managing Director.
The creative execution demonstrates a disciplined restraint. Rather than producing a high-production documentary or an emotionally manipulative film, the team delivered a Direct format campaign built around a single, transferable idea: children's drawings placed onto skateboard decks. The visual language of a child's illustration, unpolished and immediate, functions as both the medium and the message. When those drawings appear on a physical product that an adult consumer can purchase and ride, the connection between the donor and the child is tactile rather than abstract. This is a formally interesting creative decision in the context of the Spanish public interest industry, where static-image campaigns often struggle to generate the kind of emotional proximity that moving-image work achieves more easily.
The documentary and social experiment dimensions of the campaign emerge from its process rather than its final deliverable. The act of gathering children, asking them to externalise their problems through drawing, and then teaching them to skate on boards bearing those drawings contains a narrative arc that the single media asset inevitably compresses. As reported by tinobarreiro.com, Tino Barreiro was among the creatives credited with the 'Skate Your Problems' initiative, suggesting the campaign had a documented production lineage beyond its primary static asset. The campaign's restraint in format may also account in part for its Clapboard Score of 59 out of 100, which reflects the gap between a compelling concept and a fully realised body of creative output.
No verified performance data for the 'Skateboards' campaign is publicly available in terms of sales figures, media reach, or quantified fundraising outcomes attributed to named sources. What the public record does document, through sources including tinobarreiro.com and directnewideas.com, is the structural integrity of the campaign's model: a product was made, a community was engaged, and proceeds were directed to Casal dels Infants.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on the coherence of its closed-loop mechanism. A fundraising model that converts creative output directly into a purchasable object removes several of the friction points that typically separate a donor from a cause. There is no abstract pledge, no sponsored kilometre, and no charity gala. There is a skateboard with a child's drawing on it, available for purchase, with proceeds going to the organisation working with that child. That directness is both the campaign's greatest creative asset and a potential ceiling on its scale, since production of custom boards limits volume in ways that digital campaigns do not face.
The Clapboard Score of 59 out of 100 reflects this duality. The concept is original and the social mechanism is sound, but the campaign's single media asset and Direct format classification suggest an execution that did not fully develop its documentary and social experiment potential into a broader content ecosystem. For a campaign operating in Spain's competitive public interest landscape, greater investment in multi-format storytelling might have translated the intimacy of its core idea into measurable audience engagement. As it stands, 'Skateboards' represents a genuinely inventive premise that merits wider study as a model for product-integrated cause marketing within the Spanish public interest industry.
Herokid's 'Skateboards' campaign is a 2015 public interest initiative created by DDB Spain. Children from Barcelona's Raval district drew their personal problems, and those illustrations were applied to real Herokid skateboard decks. The boards were sold to raise funds for Casal dels Infants, a non-profit supporting youth at risk of social exclusion.
DDB Spain created the 'Skateboards' campaign for Herokid, launched in June 2015 in Spain. Executive Creative Director José María Roca de Viñals led the team, which included Creative Directors Javier Meléndez, Pedro Andragnes, and Paco Cabrera, alongside art directors, copywriters, and a full account team documented by Clapboard.
Casal dels Infants is a Barcelona-based non-profit working with children at risk of social exclusion in the city's Raval district. It was chosen because its community provided both the campaign's creative content and its intended beneficiaries, embedding the charity directly into the production mechanism rather than treating it as a distant recipient of funds.
The campaign used a Direct medium format and comprised one primary media asset, as documented by Clapboard. Despite this compact footprint, the concept functioned as a social experiment: children's drawings became physical products, and the sale of those products generated charitable income for Casal dels Infants in Barcelona's Raval district.
The Herokid 'Skateboards' campaign holds a Clapboard Score of 59 out of 100. The score reflects a genuinely original social mechanism and a coherent cause-driven concept, balanced against a limited single-asset execution that did not fully realise the campaign's documentary and social experiment potential across multiple content formats.
The campaign distinguishes itself in the Spanish public interest industry by integrating the fundraising object directly into the creative concept. Unlike larger organisations such as UNICEF Spain or Save the Children Spain, which typically rely on broad media campaigns, Herokid and DDB Spain built a tactile, product-based model connecting donors physically to the children they were supporting.
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