ARCHIVESave the Children Peru Hid a Crisis Inside a Math Worksheet
Save the Children's "Real Problems" campaign, created by McCann Lima and launched in Peru in October 2016, is a digital public-interest initiative that disguises the consequences of underage pregnancy as standard school mathematics and verbal-reasoning exercises, designed to be discovered and read by parents.
The campaign operates through a single dedicated website, problemasreales.com, which presents sixteen exercises — ten mathematics problems and six verbal-reasoning exercises, according to Clapboard's editorial records — each constructed with familiar classroom language and imagery. Instead of abstract variables, the exercises introduce diapers, feeding bottles, and the financial and social realities facing adolescent mothers. A parent browsing what appears to be a homework resource encounters, sentence by sentence, the lived arithmetic of early parenthood: the cost of infant formula divided across a minimum-wage salary, the number of school days lost to a first trimester. The reframing is precise and deliberate.
McCann Lima launched the website on October 11, 2016, coinciding with the International Day of the Girl, a date chosen to anchor the campaign within a globally recognised moment of advocacy for adolescent girls' rights. The campaign's geographic scope is Peru, where the issue of underage pregnancy carries significant social weight. Adolescent pregnancy has been documented as one of Peru's persistent public-health concerns by organisations including UNICEF and Save the Children's own country programme, savethechildren.org.pe. The digital medium was selected not to reach teenagers directly but to intercept parents — the adults positioned to open conversations that prevention research consistently identifies as protective. The Clapboard Score for "Real Problems" is 63 out of 100, reflecting a conceptually strong but metrically underdocumented execution.
ARCHIVESave the Children identified a specific communication failure in Peru. Conversations about sexual health and underage pregnancy between parents and adolescent children were not happening with sufficient frequency or depth, and the campaign's strategic premise rests on that gap rather than on raising general awareness.
The choice of the school exercise as a format is strategically exact. Parents in Peru, as in most markets, interact with their children's schoolwork as a matter of routine domestic life. A worksheet carries no social stigma and requires no prior willingness to engage with sexual health topics. By embedding the subject matter inside a format that parents trust and handle regularly, McCann Lima bypassed the avoidance behaviours that typically suppress parent-child dialogue on sensitive subjects. The campaign does not lecture; it creates the conditions for a conversation by first manufacturing the moment of recognition — a parent reads a problem, understands what it is actually describing, and is left holding that knowledge in a domestic context where their child is present.
The competitive landscape for cause-led digital campaigns in Peru's public-interest sector in 2016 included work from agencies operating on behalf of international NGOs, including BBDO, whose "Every Beat Matters" campaign for Save the Children globally had set a precedent for emotionally engineered digital storytelling, as documented by the New York Times and Campaign Live. McCann Lima's approach for "Real Problems" is structurally different: it is cold rather than emotional, procedural rather than narrative. Where BBDO used recorded heartbeats and music collaboration, McCann Lima used arithmetic. UNICEF Peru was also active in adolescent health communication in this period, according to unicef.org, making the differentiation of creative register — clinical versus emotional — a meaningful strategic decision rather than an incidental one.
Creative Executive Vice Presidents Mauricio Fernández Maldonado and Christian Caldwell led the campaign at McCann Lima, with Creative Director Yasu Arakaki shaping the execution. Creatives Gerardo Ramos, Ricardo Aranibar, and Mauricio Fernández Maldonado developed the specific exercise content, according to Clapboard's production records.
The craft challenge in "Real Problems" is tonal control. A single word that reads as advocacy rather than pedagogy collapses the conceit. Each of the sixteen exercises had to sustain the visual and linguistic register of a genuine school problem — standardised typefaces, neutral instructional phrasing, the familiar numbered structure of a printed worksheet — while embedding factual data about adolescent pregnancy that accumulates in meaning as the parent reads further. The mathematics exercises work the hardest: they translate abstractions like early school dropout or reduced lifetime earnings into the kind of unit-based arithmetic a child would recognise from their own homework. The verbal-reasoning exercises use reading-comprehension formats to present social scenarios involving young mothers, again without signalling their purpose before the reader is already inside the text.
Production was handled by Alonso Palomino, who also served as agency producer, with web development by Mediabytes, post-production by Plan B, and sound production by Diego Dibos Sound Lab, as documented in Clapboard's credits. The website, problemasreales.com, was the sole media asset — a deliberate constraint that concentrates all creative and communicative weight into a single digital environment. Sound design, credited to Diego Dibos Sound Lab, suggests the campaign included audio elements within the site experience, though the specific application is not publicly detailed beyond the credits. The restraint of using one asset in one medium reflects a production logic consistent with campaigns designed to spread through parental networks and earned media rather than paid placement.
No independently verified performance data for the "Real Problems" campaign — including reach figures, website traffic, or documented parent-child conversation rates — is publicly available through named sources. Latinspots.com and Mercadonegro Pe covered the campaign at the time of its launch, and Ecomedia Pe noted its presence in Peru's public-interest advertising discourse, but none of these sources published quantified outcome metrics.
What the campaign's structure makes analytically legible is its conversion architecture. The website requires no registration, no social sharing prompt, and no call to action beyond reading. Its single asset is optimised for a specific behavioural outcome — a parent arriving at the site, completing the exercises, and leaving with a changed frame for a conversation they had previously avoided. That is a narrow target behaviour, but it is a real one, and the format's plausibility as a homework resource is the mechanism that makes arrival at the site non-stigmatising.
The campaign was recognised in the regional awards circuit, with latinspots.com documenting its presence in Cannes Lions Latin America consideration, a point consistent with the campaign's creative register — precise, single-minded, and formally inventive. The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects the campaign's conceptual clarity and production discipline alongside the absence of documented impact data. In Peru's public-interest advertising landscape of 2016, a digital-only campaign addressing adolescent pregnancy through a single website was structurally unusual, and that unusualness is itself a measure of creative ambition even where quantified results remain unverified.
"Real Problems" is a digital campaign created by McCann Lima for Save the Children in Peru, launched on October 11, 2016. It presents underage pregnancy consequences as school mathematics and verbal-reasoning exercises on a dedicated website, designed to prompt parents to begin conversations with their children about sexual health and adolescent pregnancy prevention.
McCann Lima chose October 11, 2016 — the International Day of the Girl — to anchor the campaign within a globally recognised moment of advocacy for adolescent girls' rights. The date amplified the campaign's relevance in Peru's public-interest media environment and aligned Save the Children's message with international attention to adolescent welfare.
Creative Executive Vice Presidents Mauricio Fernández Maldonado and Christian Caldwell led the McCann Lima team. Creative Director Yasu Arakaki shaped the execution, with creatives Gerardo Ramos, Ricardo Aranibar, and Mauricio Fernández Maldonado developing the exercise content. Alonso Palomino produced the campaign, with web development by Mediabytes and sound by Diego Dibos Sound Lab.
The Real Problems website contains sixteen exercises in total — ten mathematics problems and six verbal-reasoning exercises. Each exercise uses standard classroom language and imagery associated with infant care to present the social and financial realities of underage pregnancy, directing the experience at parents rather than at adolescents themselves.
The Real Problems campaign was recognised in the regional awards circuit following its October 2016 launch in Peru. Latinspots.com documented its consideration within Cannes Lions Latin America. No additional independently verified award wins beyond regional recognition are publicly confirmed through named sources available to Clapboard's editorial research.
Clapboard assigned Real Problems a score of 63 out of 100. The rating reflects the campaign's strong conceptual clarity and disciplined single-asset digital execution in Peru's public-interest category, offset by the absence of publicly documented and independently verified performance metrics measuring actual audience reach or behavioural impact.
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