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Case study - 9Degrees of Kevin Bacon
The Missed Connections of Kevin Bacon
This concept was developed for Sixdegrees.org, a nonprofit on a mission to fight disconnection, one connection at a time as part of a live brief for the Roger Hatchuel Student Academy, Cannes Lions' global student competition. Our task was to help Sixdegrees.org grow visibility among the people who could actually sustain the work: millennials old enough to have the means, online enough to spread the word, and old enough to feel the cost of a missed connection.
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Our insight started somewhere unexpected: missed-connections ads, a genre of classified that's quietly documented human regret for over 300 years, and now lives on in subreddits a million members deep. Every post underneath says the same thing: "I should have." We wanted to turn that regret into action and figured the fastest way to make a niche subculture go mainstream was to hand it to the one man already famous for connecting everyone: Kevin Bacon.
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The result was "The Missed Connections of Kevin Bacon", a campaign that took Sixdegrees.org from a Reddit thread to a celebrity-fronted movement to posters on real street corners, all funnelling back to real missed-connection stories waiting to be reunited. The concept won its brief at the Roger Hatchuel Student Academy.
Role
Concept/copy, visual
Audience
35-50 yo,
United states
Format
Campaign identity, social, print
Insight
The largest archive of human regret
People have been publishing their almost-moments for 300+ years. First in newspaper personals, now across a subreddit a million members deep. Every post says the same thing underneath: "I should have".
Concept
Kevin Bacon meets Reddit
We sent in the one man who connected the whole world by accident. Kevin Bacon poses as the world's most famous missed connection, turning his own feed into a real missed-connections hub and driving his audience straight to Sixdegrees.org.
Rollout
Off screen, into the street
The campaign moved from social to real life. Posters on every pole, bus stop, and corkboard, each one a real "did you almost…" moment with tear-off tabs linking back to the site. Every connection is free; every $6 donation makes someone else's possible.
Slidedeck
Reflection
Regret, reframed
Working on a nonprofit brief with a real deadline and real judges was a different kind of pressure than a classroom project. It pushed our group to defend every idea, from the core insight down to the size of a QR code on a lamppost poster, in front of people who'd seen hundreds of decks before ours.
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The trickiest part was balancing a celebrity-led hook with a message that still felt sincere. It would have been easy to let Kevin Bacon overshadow the cause itself, so we kept coming back to one question: does this still feel like it's about connection, or does it start to feel like it's about him? Keeping the real, ordinary missed connections at the centre of every execution is what I'm proudest of in the final concept.
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Winning the brief was a nice validation, but the bigger takeaway was learning to build and defend a concept as part of a team, under real constraints, in front of a real jury.