The Mound - #39 Children of The Screen

Welcome to The Mound, a weekly newsletter in which we at Good One Creative pitch— for free — our solutions to the world’s problems.

Once upon a (very recent) time, we'd have asked doctors how many cigarettes per day was bad for us. And there would have been - at that time - some very crazy, very smelly and probably barefooted practitioners who suggested patients limit themselves to only a couple a day, to Camels or to extra-long-filtered cigarettes.

We know that scrolling is bad for us. And that's without any hard or concrete data. We feel it. In this case, we know that paying witness to an endless and yet entirely forgettable barrage of content is making us sick - and yet we lack the evidence required for an external body to at the very least regulate the shit going into our brains.

The scientific community will need a few decades before it's able to prove that an excess of screen time is detrimental to one's health. So the question is, then, what do we do until that time? How do we prevent people from killing themselves before we have the hard information required for government to outright intervene and to save us from this scourge?

We advertise.

Here's the pitch:

In popular, mass media circles, children are very often posited as a handbrake to one's progress. It can't be overlooked, though, that sometimes they make us better at our jobs.

Sometimes, kids are very, very useful.

In the fight against the screen, children are probably our best hope. Until they die, a coal miner will fight for their right to incur the cost of the product. They'll also outright kill anybody who suggests putting their children into those same environments for profit.

Children are how we fix this. And so they must be the subject of our ads.

Without evidence, many an ad-person (myself included) will resort to metaphor or to campaigns that show what a child's life could be if not for the distraction of YouTube or TikTok. Many an idea might win a Cannes Lion or a Grand Prix that invokes the beauty and the wonder of an explorative, be-home-by-the-street-lights childhood -

but none of them will work.

As a child - for the sake of road and work safety - I saw men and women burned alive at 7PM on Channel 10, their faces melted onto kitchen floors by cooking oil, their bodies mutilated by bread slicers, and drink drivers destroy mothers so that I and my cohorts got it through our very thin skulls that something had to change. As evidenced by my writing to you of them now, these images stuck. These ads worked.

What the anti-smoking and the anti-drink-driving campaigns had going for them was the immediate, visceral impact of those behaviours. The anti-screen movement has no such luck.

But they do have us.

What we propose is an ad that, in lieu of hard data or autopsy, illustrates the damage of a screen on a child's health.

Have you ever seen Indiana Jones? You remember that scene where the Nazis open the arc of the covenant and their faces melt over the horrid infrastructure of their skulls?

Sometimes this business asks us to do something ugly for the greater good.

To save us all, I think we need to see a campaign, images everywhere of children's faces being melted by the inhuman, the unrelenting light of a screen.

Do I like imagining this? No. Do I want to see this in the world? Abso-fucking-lutely.

You’re welcome, Australia. 

Special shoutouts:

The Metung Hotel bats wayyy above its pay grade. If you can stomach the 3.5 hour drive from Melbourne, let me know you’re coming and I’d love nothing more than to assuage any fears about the fact they’re offering parmas, seafood, curries, pies, and noodles: they can do it - and very bloody well. 

God bless you; I’m much better in person.