COANIQUEM and DDB Turn Burned Children Into Prevention Advocates
COANIQUEM's 2018 film campaign 'Miguel Ángel, Martina y Benjamín, Sofía,' created by DDB Chile, is a public-interest initiative in which four real children who survived burns deliver burn-prevention advice directly to Chilean families, transforming personal testimony into a public health communication tool.
COANIQUEM — Chile's nonprofit foundation specialising in the rehabilitation and prevention of childhood burns — commissioned DDB to develop a campaign that could cut through the emotional distance that typically separates prevention messaging from its audience. The solution was structural as much as creative. Rather than deploying adult spokespeople, medical authority figures, or dramatised scenarios, DDB placed Miguel Ángel, Martina, Benjamín, and Sofía at the centre of the work. Each child, having lived through a burn injury and its aftermath, speaks from earned experience rather than scripted empathy. The campaign was published in April 2018 and is built across three film assets, making the medium itself central to the strategy: only film could capture the particular weight of a child's face as they recount what they now know.
In Chile, childhood burn injuries represent a persistent public health concern, with COANIQUEM standing as the country's most established institutional response to that reality over several decades of operation. The #ConsejosCOANIQUEM initiative — consejos meaning advice or tips in Spanish — uses the hashtag format to signal shareability and community participation while grounding the content in something far more serious than a social media trend. The campaign operates in the public interest category, functioning less as a fundraising appeal and more as a behavioural intervention: its stated purpose is to change how Chilean caregivers think and act around the domestic risks that cause the majority of childhood burns.
COANIQUEM identified a credibility gap at the heart of conventional burn-prevention communication. Standard public-service messaging in Chile, as in many markets, relies on instructional formats — warnings, diagrams, official guidance — that carry institutional authority but rarely achieve emotional traction with the caregivers they most need to reach. DDB's strategic answer was to collapse that gap entirely by replacing the institutional voice with the voice of consequence: a child who already knows what happens when prevention fails.
This approach reflects a well-documented principle in public-interest communication. Testimonial formats, particularly those featuring individuals whose vulnerability is visible and whose experience is recent, consistently outperform instructional formats in generating sustained attention and behavioural recall. The #ConsejosCOANIQUEM campaign applies that principle with unusual rigour by refusing any fictional mediation. The children in the films are not actors playing survivors; they are the survivors themselves, and that distinction is legible on screen in ways that no production technique can replicate.
In Chile, the competitive landscape for public attention in the social-cause space includes organisations such as UNICEF Chile and the Chilean Red Cross, both of which run ongoing prevention and welfare communications. Against that context, COANIQUEM's decision to anchor the campaign in hyperspecific individual identities — named children, not anonymous case studies — represents a deliberate differentiation. The names in the campaign title, Miguel Ángel, Martina, Benjamín, and Sofía, are not incidental; they are the strategic unit of the work, insisting that these are specific people with specific histories rather than emblematic figures. According to the campaign's own framing as documented on Clapboard, the documentary and social-experiment approach was chosen precisely to foreground participant-led testimony over agency-constructed narrative.
The campaign comprises three film assets, each functioning as a discrete piece of testimony while contributing to a cumulative effect across the series. The creative approach — described in Clapboard's documentation as documentary and social-experiment in style — prioritises authenticity of environment and expression over production polish, a choice that requires considerable skill to execute without the result appearing unintentional.
The films place Miguel Ángel, Martina, Benjamín, and Sofía in positions where they are giving advice rather than receiving it — a reversal of the expected power dynamic between children and adults that gives the work its structural tension. When a child who has been burned tells a caregiver what they should have done differently, the moral and emotional authority of that exchange is not manufactured by the agency; it is released by the format. DDB's creative contribution is precisely in recognising that this release was possible and in designing a production context that allowed it to happen.
The campaign was developed by DDB Chile, with creative direction attributed to Walter Ioli and Beto Cocito, and directed by Jorge Portales, as documented in the campaign's production credits. The choice of a director with the sensibility to work with child participants in a documentary register — eliciting genuine expression rather than performed delivery — is itself a significant craft decision. Production credits for the campaign are further substantiated by listings at latinspots.com and Awards Ddb, which identify the core creative team. The three-asset structure also reflects a strategic production choice: rather than a single extended film, the campaign creates multiple entry points for audience engagement, each complete in itself and each centred on a different child's perspective.
No verified performance data for 'Miguel Ángel, Martina y Benjamín, Sofía' is publicly available. No reach figures, donation-volume data, awareness-lift metrics, or media-spend information have been located across trade press, effectiveness databases, or award-scheme submissions reviewed for this analysis. No verified awards entries have been identified in the Cannes Lions, Effie Awards, D&AD, The One Show, Clio Awards, or Webby Awards databases.
Structural analysis, however, supports a considered assessment of the campaign's likely effectiveness as a public-interest communication. The three-film format maximises the probability that at least one of the four children's stories will connect with any given viewer's own domestic context — a form of audience segmentation achieved through character rather than media targeting. The documentary register removes the perceptual distance that dramatic reconstruction creates, reducing the cognitive work required for a caregiver to apply the advice to their own household.
The #ConsejosCOANIQUEM hashtag structure builds a participatory layer into what might otherwise remain a broadcast campaign, creating the conditions for organic extension of the message through Chilean social media networks without requiring paid amplification. The campaign's publication in April 2018 aligns with a period in which, according to lionbridge.com, digital media consumption in Chile was expanding alongside broader Latin American digital growth trends, increasing the potential reach of film content distributed through online channels. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is N/A.
'Miguel Ángel, Martina y Benjamín, Sofía' is a 2018 Chilean public-interest film campaign created by DDB Chile for COANIQUEM. It features four real children who survived burn injuries delivering prevention advice to caregivers, using survivor testimony as the primary communication tool across three film assets under the #ConsejosCOANIQUEM initiative.
Miguel Ángel, Martina, Benjamín, and Sofía are four real Chilean children who experienced burn injuries and participated in COANIQUEM's 2018 campaign. They appear as themselves, not actors, sharing first-hand prevention advice. Their individual identities form the campaign's strategic and creative core, replacing institutional messaging with personal testimony.
DDB Chile created the #ConsejosCOANIQUEM campaign for COANIQUEM in April 2018. Creative direction was led by Walter Ioli and Beto Cocito, with Jorge Portales serving as director. The campaign was produced as a documentary and social-experiment-style series and is listed on awards.ddb.com and latinspots.com among the agency's work.
COANIQUEM is Chile's nonprofit foundation specialising in the rehabilitation and prevention of childhood burns. It launched the 2018 campaign to address a credibility gap in conventional prevention messaging, replacing instructional formats with survivor testimony from real children to generate stronger emotional engagement and behavioural change among Chilean caregivers.
No verified awards for 'Miguel Ángel, Martina y Benjamín, Sofía' have been identified. Searches across Cannes Lions, D&AD, Effie Awards, The One Show, Clio Awards, and Webby Awards databases returned no confirmed entries or wins for this COANIQUEM campaign from DDB Chile's 2018 public-interest work.
The #ConsejosCOANIQUEM hashtag builds a participatory layer into the campaign, enabling Chilean audiences to share survivor advice through social media networks beyond the original film assets. This structure allows the prevention message to extend organically without requiring additional paid media, amplifying COANIQUEM's public-interest communication across digital platforms in Chile.
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