category finalist
jg@sukle.com
Seven minutes. That is how long the average American child spends in unstructured outdoor play each day. They spend more than seven hours on screens. Those two numbers frame everything Great Outdoors Colorado’s Generation Wild is trying to change—and the specific problem Sukle was asked to solve through a mutli-year initiative.
The barrier is not that parents do not care. They do. The barrier is that getting kids outside takes planning, and planning takes bandwidth that most families do not have at the end of a long day. Sukle needed an idea so simple it required almost no effort to start—and so naturally engaging that it brought kids back outside on its own.
The idea for 2025 was seeds. Free packets of native Colorado wildflower seeds, developed in partnership with Applewood Seed Company and vetted by Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the Butterfly Pavilion, that anyone could spread and grow. Originally introduced in 2024, Wilderflowers™ gave families a tangible outdoor activity with a built-in reason to return: plant the seeds, check on them, watch them grow. Each visit is a small act of curiosity that deepens a child’s connection to nature’s rhythms—and each visit is another day they chose outside over the screen.
For 2025, Sukle brought the seeds back with an integrated “Wilderflowers Are Back!” campaign. The hero spot used handcrafted, practical puppetry—not CGI—to bring wildflowers to life inside a family’s home, growing from the floorboards, climbing across the couch, spilling up the walls, until a child puts down a tablet and follows the flowers outside. The choice to build physical puppets was deliberate: in a campaign about reconnecting kids with the tactile, real, living world, the campaign craft had to feel tactile, real, and living.
The response exceeded every benchmark:
• 126,000 seed packets picked up statewide — 151 million individual seeds — a 26% increase over the prior year
• Distribution expanded from 250 to 585+ partner sites, including 663 classrooms that opted in
• 2.8 million video views
• 34% increase in traffic to GenerationWild.com
• “Enter Wilderflowers, the charmingly simple, wildly effective idea… No guilt trips. No lectures. Just a fun, hands-on excuse to go play.” - Mile High Mamas
But the number Sukle cares about most is the one hardest to measure: how many kids were inspired to go back outside a second, third or fourth time because they wanted to see if their seeds had grown. That is behavior-change at its most elegant—a simple object, a clear action, a built-in feedback loop, and a campaign architecture that scales through community partners, schools, and libraries from the Front Range to the Western Slope. No massive media budget required. Just seeds, curiosity, and a reason to go back outside again tomorrow.
