CLIENT: Feeding America
AGENCY: leo burnett
ROLE: Senior ART DIRECTor

37 million Americans, including more than 11 million children don’t have enough to eat. For many people, hunger in America is invisible. They don’t know what it looks like or feels like. The truth is, hunger can be hard to recognize because it affects people from all walks of life in every community across the country – our neighbors, children’s classmates, even coworkers could be struggling to get enough to eat.

Using real stories, data from the USDA, and artificial intelligence, new PSAs from Feeding America and the Ad Council introduce a lifelike data-driven portrait of domestic hunger. By revealing these stories, the face of hunger challenges public perception of who struggles with hunger in the United States.

The Feeding America network of 200 local food banks is the largest domestic hunger-relief organization. Their mission is to feed America’s hungry through a nationwide network of member food banks and engage our country in the fight to end hunger. To learn more visit http://www.IamHungerinAmerica.org.

Case study

Film

The making of "I am Hunger in America"

Hunger looks more familiar than you think

• 40 million Americans struggle with hunger.

• Most of the people Feeding America serves come from households with at least one working adult.

• Children are more likely to face hunger than any other population in the U.S. More than 12 million children face hunger in America.

• 78% of the counties with the highest hunger rates are in rural America.

A lifelike representation of hunger

Created with AI from thousands of photos and demographic data of people struggling with hunger.

First, Feeding America worked with their network of food banks to gather thousands of photos of Americans struggling with hunger to help create my face. Then using 2018 USDA demographic data of Americans facing hunger, including gender, age and ethnicity, we matched real photos to those demographics to help shape my face.Finally, the 1,000 photos were used by Artificial Intelligence to construct an image that resulted in me, a lifelike portrait that represents what hunger looks like in America.