The archive · Content & Film · Marketing decision · 2024
UN Foundation turns the Summit of the Future into a creator-led live stream for youth
Instead of formal UN briefings, an 'edutainment' live stream recruited global creators to break down the Summit of the Future for young audiences.
United Nations Foundation
What it had to solve
At the 79th UN General Assembly, the UN Foundation needed to ignite global attention and youth engagement for the Summit of the Future — a challenge of making high-stakes geopolitics land with young people.
How it works
The United Nations Foundation faced a youth-engagement problem at the 79th UN General Assembly: it needed to ignite global attention for the Summit of the Future, a diplomatic milestone whose formal register was unlikely to reach young people.
The creative bet was that young audiences would engage with the Summit if it stopped sounding like the UN. 'Once Upon a Future' launched as a 30-minute live-streamed broadcast designed to educate youth, recruiting global creators from beauty to current-events satire to bring their own points of view.
Each creator translated complex geopolitical, social and economic topics into bespoke content using Gen Z-coded internet language, turning the broadcast into 'edutainment' — education that behaves like the media young people already consume. The work is preserved in the D&AD Awards archive as a different way for institutions to address youth.
Why it lands
- Formal UN communication describes the Summit accurately but competes poorly with the content young audiences actually watch.
- Creators already hold the attention of the target audience, so their participation is distribution as much as production.
- Comedy and Gen Z-coded language lower the barrier to complex topics, making 'edutainment' a realistic path in.
- A live streamed event creates a shared moment that a statement or press release can never produce.
What it did
The format redefined how the UN engages young people: instead of a formal briefing, the Summit arrived as a show young audiences could watch, understand and share. The work is preserved in the D&AD Awards archive.
What you can take
If the audience won't come to an institution's register, change the register: recruit voices the audience already trusts and let them translate the subject into the culture's own language.
Since then
Once Upon a Future did not replace UN diplomacy, but it demonstrated an engagement model an institution like the UN Foundation could reuse: hand the explanation of a complex summit to creators who speak the audience's language, and stream it as an event. Preserved in the D&AD Awards archive, the campaign stands as an early example of institutional communication adopting creator-led formats rather than translating its own.
Sources
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