The inside scoop on the ‘harrowing’ child poverty ad making everyone cry

“Working with them was such a massive privilege,” affirms chief exec Dan Cullen-Shute. “Nothing we've done, nobody we've worked with so far has grabbed us in quite this way.”

It’s personal for the agency boss. He wants MPs to feel ashamed - and for the whole world to know about the plight in supposedly one of the world's most developed nations. The interview was as much a tear-jerker as the ad.

“There are roughly 60m people in the UK and 4m of those of children who live below the poverty line. It's 2023 and we're still one of the richest countries in the world,” he continues. “No statistic, no killer fucking fact that we've ever had to work with comes close to how genuinely gut-wrenching that is. But I think part of the challenge is it's too big, like how do you comprehend that?”

That hurdle was met by one of the agency’s rising talents, senior creative Meg Egan. She was the driving force behind the project, taking the shocking story and telling it in a compelling way. It’s one she knows all too well, growing up on free school meals herself. “I can't imagine what I would have done without them,” she says. “The initial briefing was harrowing; I wasn’t prepared for it. We heard so many horrible stories. One of them was that a kid had been caught eating an eraser, and that's not an irregular occurrence.”

What eventually informed the creative for this ad though, was a story that came from a school in Lewisham where a kid arrived with an empty lunchbox. At lunchtime, the nine-year-old boy proceeded to sit in the canteen and pretend to eat food. He was ashamed to be left out.

Egan continues: “The job that we had was making this charity known. It is not asking for donations; it is not asking for anything. It just wants to bring this to light, and make people feel angry. We felt like any of these stories would make people go ‘What the fuck is happening?’”

The reason they started with food is because it is such an emotive topic.

“Through the inaction of the state, through the inaction of our elected representatives we are denying children a basic right” adds Cullen-Shute. It was one of the stranger briefs the team worked. Emotive and exhausting.

“Virtually every creative review we had, including the first pitch meeting, we couldn't stop crying in because it's such an emotive subject,” explains chief creative officer Ben Middleton. “It's quite a weird thing. I've never been in a pitch meeting and not been able to get through a script.”

The production process and casting the kids couldn’t feel tokenistic and CPAG was guiding the creatives through this the entire time. Filming was manic with 40 kids on set. And they were all excited to be there.

“We couldn’t stop them from eating the props. They were eating their own body weight in popcorn,” laughs Egan. “They kept putting their fingers in the jelly too.” The writer jokes she went and sat in a dark room afterward.

One of her favorite moments of the day was when the claw of one of the lobsters fell off and the kids declared an emergency. Between takes, there were a lot of noises of disgust toward the crustacean. All the props were real, the burgers were on a big pole that was fed up through the table by hand. The kid that just happened to be placed by the donuts had the best seat in the house, to the dismay of the fellow actors who were quick to voice it.

Those natural soundbites of laughter and childlike nonsense were what the director Adam Berg wanted to capture; the first half of the film is very carefree after all. “You can’t really mimic the sound of kids laughing together,” she explains. “Just this cacophony of them messing around, we had microphones rolling the whole day.”

All the children in the film had worked in theatre before, the lead boy had previously worked on Les Misérables and Matilda productions. Egan says that it ­­­was important that they found an actor that could portray the imaginary happiness at the start of the ad, so that then when they switched to the sadness, it really got people right in the gut.

Although so much of the initial filming had lots of silliness, the team knew the moment that the scene would turn and that was difficult. It was dark, as Egan puts it. Everything was done by the director in-camera so as the children leave the room and the protagonist is left on his own, it really felt to the crew that he had been abandoned in the big open canteen.

The message the team wants to get across to the government is: do something, engage with this issue. “It's very hard not to get personal about it because when your prime minister is literally a billionaire, and he's standing up in front of people saying just hold the line and keep strong,” adds Cullen-Shute.

“This isn't just kids who are hungry. These are kids who are hungry all day and then go home and don't have clothes to change into, and don't have a bedroom of their own to sleep in. And the idea that when school ends they get a break, fuck that, because then there's no food for them at home then either.”

It was a weird feeling when the ad went live, admits Egan. “When it went live, I didn’t really know how to feel about it. You know what I mean? It's just tragic that has to exist in the first place.”