Social Protection

Social protection is a set of risk-sharing policies that governments create to protect their citizens. These policies help prevent people from falling into poverty and create better chances for economic growth for everyone. In other words, they’re social safety nets. In the US, we have Social Security, welfare, Medicaid, and other programs. The problem is, these programs rely on employers to set aside money from people’s paychecks. That worked great when Grandpa worked his entire life at one company, but in today’s world—not so much. People are driving Uber, working at Task Rabbit and freelancing in the “gig economy.” Without a traditional employer/employee relationship, it’s complicated to manage and collect funds for the greater good of all. In the developing world, traditional social protection systems were created based on policies in wealthy countries. We all know things are very different in the third world, where informal work is prevalent. Over time, it became clear that developing countries needed new policies to match the working cultures there. So in a weird twist, developed and developing nations are becoming more alike in terms of how people work. Add in climate change, technological disruption, and political turmoil, and you suddenly have 100-year-old policies that are a mismatch for how things work today. That’s why the World Bank Group is urging countries to modernize their policy. As a studio, our goal was simple: to make the best damn video ever created about social protection and risk-sharing policy. From a creative approach, we wanted to do something exciting and fresh. After exploring 10 or so concepts, we went with the idea of comparing and contrasting the developed world with the developing world. To represent the developing world, we created a moto-trailer, and an Uber driver represents the developed world. We then imagined a scene where they race and dodge policy books falling around. We love these types of projects because they require focus, understanding, and a lot of critical thinking. The material is dense, and it’s challenging to distill the messages from a 150-page technical white paper into a short video. We knew this would be an opportunity to play a role in helping a large group of people. If we’re successful in changing the policy in one country, our work could positively affect the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. And that’s something we’re passionate about. Film advertisement created by Bien, United States for The World Bank Group, within the category: Public Interest, NGO.