Saída de Emergência Brings Children's Rights to Life in Digital
Saída de Emergência launched "The Book of Children's Great Rights" in Portugal in July 2018, a digital campaign created by Lisbon agency Fuel that repositions children's rights as a narrative experience designed for young readers rather than a policy document for adults, according to Readingrockets.
The campaign centres on a single digital media asset built around an illustrated book of the same name, published by Saída de Emergência — a Portuguese independent publisher founded in 2003 by Luís Corte Real and his brother, as documented by Observador Pt, with an original focus on fantasy, science fiction, and horror. The title marks a meaningful departure from that genre heritage, entering the children's media and entertainment space with a work that distils complex human-rights language into age-appropriate storytelling. According to a feature published on the FNAC Portugal blog on 28 May 2018, the book presents children's rights in a form that children themselves can understand and internalise, expanding beyond the framework of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to encompass 40 distinct rights in total. In Portugal, where children's literacy and civic education sit at the intersection of cultural policy and publishing strategy, this kind of editorial intervention carries weight that extends beyond the bookshelf, according to Guides Lib Usf Edu.
Fuel's involvement connects to an established agency-client relationship that, based on documented campaigns, spans at least five years — reaching back to a September 2013 campaign also produced for Saída de Emergência, per clapboard.com records. The 2018 campaign carries a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100, reflecting a project that demonstrates clear conceptual intent within a category — children's media and entertainment — where emotional resonance and educational purpose are the primary currencies of creative value, according to Childlitassn.
Saída de Emergência occupies a distinctive position in the Portuguese publishing landscape. The publisher entered the children's media and entertainment segment from a genre fiction background, which gave Fuel an unusual strategic brief: communicate the seriousness of children's rights without adopting the institutional register that typically distances young audiences from rights-based content. The creative platform — a book, promoted digitally — answers that brief by treating the child as the primary reader rather than an adult intermediary.
The market context reinforces the strategic logic. In Portugal, the non-schoolbook publishing market was valued at €220.6 million at retail prices in 2018, according to observador.pt, with bookshop-channel sales representing €175 million, or 79.33% of that total, per the same source. Online book sales accounted for €18.4 million, or 8.34% of the Portuguese non-schoolbook market in 2018, according to observador.pt — a figure that contextualises Fuel's decision to anchor the campaign in a digital medium while the primary product remained a physical book distributed through traditional retail. In that environment, digital campaigns serve principally as discovery and awareness tools for print titles, making the single-asset digital execution a considered rather than limited choice.
Within the Portuguese children's publishing segment, Saída de Emergência competes for shelf space and cultural attention against established local and international houses, including Porto Editora — the dominant force in Portuguese educational and children's publishing — and Kalandraka Portugal, which has built significant equity in illustrated children's books with rights-related and social themes. Against both competitors, Saída de Emergência's positioning on this title is differentiated: it is neither curriculum-driven like Porto Editora nor purely aesthetic like Kalandraka's signature visual works. It occupies a civic storytelling niche that, in 2018, remained underserved in the Portuguese market.
The campaign's creative execution rests on the tension between the weight of its subject matter and the lightness required to reach a child audience. Fuel structured the campaign around a single digital asset, a disciplined creative decision that concentrates attention on the book itself rather than dispersing it across multiple executional formats. That restraint is itself a creative statement: in a media environment saturated with multi-platform children's content, the choice to let one well-crafted asset carry the message reflects confidence in the underlying product.
The book's design philosophy, as described in the FNAC Portugal blog feature of May 2018, prioritises accessibility and visual engagement, translating each of the 40 rights into language and imagery that a child can process independently. This editorial approach places significant creative responsibility on the illustrative and typographic decisions made at the book level — decisions that the digital campaign then had to reflect and amplify within a single compressed format. The challenge for Fuel was to communicate the emotional and civic ambition of the project in a medium that rewards immediacy.
Credits for the campaign document the involvement of Marcelo Lourenço, Pedro Bexiga, Hiro Kawahara, and Marcelo Lavandoski, a team whose collective contribution shaped both the strategic framing and the executional character of the digital asset. Their work situates "The Book of Children's Great Rights" within a tradition of Portuguese design and advertising that treats civic and cultural briefs with the same creative rigour applied to commercial work — a tradition that Fuel, as a Lisbon agency, has consistently represented across its documented output for Saída de Emergência since at least 2013, per clapboard.com.
No verified performance data for "The Book of Children's Great Rights" is publicly available. No published sales figures, brand-tracking results, or media spend data have been identified for this campaign, and no award entries or shortlists have been confirmed across Cannes Lions, the Effies, D&AD, The One Show, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards, based on available records from clapboard.com. No trade press coverage has been identified in Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious.
Structural analysis, however, points to several durable strengths. The campaign's alignment between medium and message is precise: a digital execution promoting a physical book about children's rights in a market where, according to observador.pt, online book sales represented 8.34% of the Portuguese non-schoolbook market in 2018 reflects an accurate reading of where discovery happens even when purchase occurs in-store. The single-asset discipline prevents dilution of a conceptually simple but emotionally demanding proposition — that rights are stories, and stories belong to children.
The FNAC Portugal platform endorsement, documented in the May 2018 blog feature, suggests that the campaign succeeded in reaching at least one high-visibility retail channel known for curating culturally significant Portuguese titles. For an independent publisher like Saída de Emergência operating outside the schoolbook segment, that kind of retail editorial visibility carries disproportionate strategic value. The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its civic brief with honesty and craft, while remaining constrained by the scale limitations natural to a single-market, single-asset, independent publishing project.
Saída de Emergência published "The Book of Children's Great Rights" as a digital campaign in Portugal in July 2018. Created by Lisbon agency Fuel, it promoted an illustrated book distilling 40 children's rights into language accessible to young readers, positioning civic education as an engaging storytelling experience rather than institutional documentation.
Fuel, a Lisbon-based advertising agency, created the campaign for Portuguese publisher Saída de Emergência. The credited team includes Marcelo Lourenço, Pedro Bexiga, Hiro Kawahara, and Marcelo Lavandoski, according to clapboard.com. Fuel's documented relationship with Saída de Emergência extends back to at least September 2013, per clapboard.com records.
The book expands beyond the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, encompassing 40 distinct rights in total. According to a FNAC Portugal blog feature published in May 2018, it presents these rights in a child-friendly format, making the content directly accessible to young readers rather than adult policymakers or educators.
Portugal's non-schoolbook market was valued at €220.6 million at retail prices in 2018, according to observador.pt. Bookshop channels dominated with €175 million in sales, while online sales reached €18.4 million, per the same source. This landscape shaped Fuel's decision to use a single digital asset as a discovery tool for a physical book.
No award entries or shortlists for The Book of Children's Great Rights have been confirmed. Available records from clapboard.com show no verifiable results across Cannes Lions, D&AD, The One Show, the Effies, the Clios, Webby Awards, or WARC Awards. The campaign carries a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100.
Saída de Emergência was founded in 2003 by Luís Corte Real and his brother, originally focused on fantasy, science fiction, and horror, according to observador.pt. The 2018 children's rights book represents a significant editorial expansion. The publisher has worked with agency Fuel across multiple campaigns, with a documented relationship spanning at least five years per clapboard.com.
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