This is a World Food Programme (WFP) campaign, featuring Swedish football star Zlatan Ibrahimovic, addressing the problem of world hunger. The social influence of Ibrahimovic, coupled with high media coverage made this campaign go viral earlier this year.
The campaign is an excellent example of how social influence can help tackle global issues such as the eradication of hunger. Although world hunger is a well known issue it is often neglected in the media. As the WFP says: “People suffering from hunger don’t often make the front page, yet hunger and malnutrition are the number one risk to health worldwide — greater than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.” (WFP, 2015)
The United Nations WFP is the largest non-profit agency focusing on the issue of world hunger. They operate in 75 different countries and on average help 80 Million people with food assistance each year. The WFP claims that world hunger is a solvable issue even without major scientific breakthroughs.The resources and knowledge we currently have, with sufficient political will can solve this problem. The difficulty is to pool all the resources together to solve the issue as soon as possible. This was the main goal of the ‘805 Million Names’ campaign.
The video was published online on the 15th of February 2015, with most of the video footage recorded the day before during the football match between Paris Saint-German and Caen in Paris. Within a week the video had reached 13 million viewers on Facebook and Youtube, and the campaign was featured in over 3000 articles worldwide. (Catena, 2015) Several other celebrities such as David Beckham, Novak Djokovic and Enrique Iglesias have shown their support for the campaign. Even the FC Barcelona football club shared the video on their facebook page.
Ibrahimovic’s Facebook page has close to 23 Million likes which helped the campaign reach a large audience instantly. Ibrahimovic posted the video among with several photos, and statuses updating his fans about the progress of the campaign.
This campaign shows how important social influence can be to raise awareness on social media platforms. The campaign also shows how social influence can help address major global issues rather than simply promote a product or brand. Nowadays social influence is often used as simply a tool to increase profits and we rarely hear about humanitarian campaigns such as this one. Only time will tell if the campaign was a success as hopefully the number of people suffering from hunger will steadily decrease from 805 Million.
References
Catena, M., (2015) ‘805 Million Names and How It All Happened’ HuffingtonPost viewed October 13th 2015 at <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marina-catena/805-million-names-and-how_b_6722472.html>
World Food Programme, (2015) ‘805 MILLION NAMES’ http://cdn.wfp.org/2015/805millionnames/
https://www.facebook.com/ZlatanIbrahimovic
