Responses by Jyrki Poutanen, chief creative officer, United Imaginations.
Background: The war in Ukraine has faded from headlines but not from reality. UNICEF Finland wanted to remind Finns that the bombings still continue and that children are still caught in them. The goal was to turn fleeting awareness into tangible help by transforming Finland’s digital outdoor media into a real-time humanitarian alarm system. The campaign spoke to everyone, but especially to those numbed by two years of constant coverage, to make them feel again and to donate.
Design thinking: The idea was to make distance impossible to ignore. Nearly all of Finland’s digital outdoor screens were connected directly to Ukraine’s official air-raid alert system. Whenever sirens sounded there, billboards across Helsinki reacted in real time, interrupting their normal ads to display an urgent call to donate for children living under attack. The intent wasn’t to dramatize the situation but to make it visible, enabling the reality of war to reach people as it happened and offering an immediate way to help.
Challenges: Technically, the project was a puzzle. Finland’s outdoor landscape is split among several major vendors: Bauer Media, JCDecaux, Mediateko, Ocean Outdoor and Outshine, among others. Each operates on different systems. Our tech partner Sipuli Group had to invent a way to synchronize Ukraine’s live alerts with all of their systems in real time.
We had to build two different types of API interface and, for some vendors, even close-to-analog solutions—meaning that when an alert appeared in our chosen platform, a human trigger manually overrode the ad feed across certain networks. It became a hybrid of automation and human readiness, much like emergency response itself.
Specific project demands: The same technical hurdles that made the project complex also proved its purpose. Even when systems weren’t built to talk to each other and manual intervention was needed, nothing stood in the way once the cause was understood. Sipuli Group’s inventiveness and the shared effort of competing outdoor companies turned every obstacle into an act of solidarity, showing that when the goal is to protect children under fire, technology and people will both rise to the task.
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