The last time a state government asked an illustrator to help announce a social program, the strategy probably involved a pamphlet and a post office. Times, as they say, have changed.
New Mexico, which in November became the first state to offer universal child care at no cost to families regardless of income, turned to the illustrator James Yang to create the visual vocabulary for its announcement campaign. Mr. Yang, working with the agency K2MD, produced artwork in what the agency described as a "children's book-inspired style" — warm, optimistic, and notably devoid of the stock-photo families that typically populate government advertising.
The spot, animated by Anik Rosenblum under the creative direction of Randall Marshall and the associate creative director and copywriter Maria Anderson, anchored a statewide campaign for the New Mexico Early Childhood Education and Care Department. The department reported that one thousand families enrolled on the first day, five thousand in the first two weeks, and forty thousand children have been served since November.
(One imagines the meetings where someone had to explain that an illustration of a happy family might communicate "child care" more effectively than a photograph of a happy family. Advertising is full of such revelations.)
The campaign represents something of a rarity in government advertising: a program that is genuinely new rather than a rebranding of something that already existed, announced with creative work that appears to have been conceived specifically for the message rather than assembled from available parts. Whether other states will follow New Mexico's policy lead remains a question for legislators. Whether they will follow its creative lead — commissioning original illustration rather than licensing it — may depend on factors that have less to do with children than with budgets.
Mr. Yang, for his part, now has a portfolio piece that no amount of product advertising can quite match: he helped draw the first of something.
Original story published in Adweek: "James Yang Helps Launch Historic Universal Child Care Campaign"