The Phone Book
Odido
Overview
It feels like a phone, reads like a phone, but it’s not a phone! Odido introduces ‘Het Telefoonboekje’.
As children progress through elementary school, their reading habits often diminish. Odido addresses this challenge with Het Telefoonboekje, the first phone-sized children’s book!
This initiative, part of the ‘Soms even niet’ brand campaign, collaborates with beloved children’s book author Marjon Hoffman to reignite a love for reading in a modern format. By transforming the book into an app, Odido provides a familiar digital platform that draws young readers back into the enchanting world of literature.
The Challenge
As children move through the later years of primary school, their screentime rises while their reading time drops dramatically. Smartphones become ever-present – long before high school – and the pull of messaging, social feeds, and apps slowly replaces the focus and imagination that reading stimulates. By age twelve, daily reading outside school has halved, with clear consequences for language development and concentration.
For a telecom brand that embraces the possibilities of technology, Odido faced a meaningful tension: how to help children balance the digital world without rejecting it. The goal wasn’t to take smartphones away, but to create a moment where kids would willingly put them aside.
The Solution
TBWA\NEBOKO flipped the challenge by turning the smartphone from a distraction into the inspiration. If kids are glued to their phones, then a book that looks and feels like a phone might just be the bridge back to reading. That led to Het Telefoonboekje: the first phone-shaped children’s book, written by bestselling author Marjon Hoffman and told entirely through WhatsApp-style messages.
We gave reading a new, contemporary meaning by designing the book around the behaviors kids already have. The format fits in their hands like a device, the story unfolds like a chat thread, and the humour and characters mirror the way children talk and connect with friends. Instead of asking kids to break away from the digital world, the idea meets them inside it – and gently redirects their attention toward a story that feels just as engaging as an app.
By transforming the familiar into something unexpectedly analogue, Het Telefoonboekje makes reading feel modern again – and shows children that a good story can be just as captivating as a
