DAVID’s Women Empowerment Ingenuity
Seeking to empower women of all ages, with insightful knowledge of how to take control of their own well-being monitoring, poses a continual communication challenge for the DAVID Agency and MACMA Argentina, a non-profit organisation, dedicated to supporting women with breast cancer.
The key to detecting early symptoms of breast cancer, for totally curable outcomes, are self-examination routines, that require showing women step-by-step techniques of self-examination on naked, and real breasts.
But in Argentina, as in many other countries, images of naked breasts are banned from public broadcast channels, and creative alternatives have to be found of visually demonstrating self-examining methods that would pass censorship, and be engagingly informative.
1. Macma Argentina, The Art of Self-Examination
Advertising Agency: DAVID, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Production Company: POSTER, Buenos Aires, Argentina
The DAVID Agency and Macma Argentina, conceived an innovative activation, staged in the Hispanic American Museum of Art, Isaac Fernández Blanco, Buenos Aires.
“The Art of Self-Examination” was inspired by the studies done by Dr. Liliana Sosa, and verified by research published in The Lancet medical journal, that detected evidence of breast cancer in the subjects of Rembrandt’s Bathsheba Holding King David’s Letter; Rubens’ The Three Graces; and Raphael’s The Portrait of a Young Woman.
The campaign commercial, directed by filmmaker Dana Campanello, reveals how full-scale copies were made of the three masterpieces, with the exhibited bare breasts moulded in 3D, to create realistic lumps, skin retraction and swollen lymph nodes, that gallery viewers were invited to touch to get a sense of what to feel for when performing self-examinations.
The ingeniously produced, interactive, out-of-home public experience, of the art-world’s universally acclaimed nude masterpieces, that have been in the public domain for 500 years, is a highly laudable initiative, that without a doubt, will be an advertising communication industry award-winner of many accolade accruals.
2. MACMA Argentina, Man Boobs
Advertising Agency: David, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Statistically, women over 25, on average, habitually check their cell phones every 5 to 10 minutes, but motivating them to examine their breasts regularly, without being able to show step-by-step techniques of self-examination on naked breasts, real breasts, posed a challenge for Joaquin Cubria and Ignacio Ferioli, executive creative directors at David.
They decided to risk circumventing the censors by substituting ‘man boobs’ for naked female breasts in their instructive, early-detention MACMA commercial, and made advertising history.
Directed by Argentinian filmmaking duo Tommy Quartino and Fran Colombatti, the campaign won a Cannes Gold Lion for Film, and a Cannes Health for Good Grand Prix.
48 million views were motivated in the first week of airing, and shared 700,000 times, becoming the most viewed and shared breast self-examination campaign ever.
3. MACMA Argentina, Everybody Loves Boobs
Advertising Agency: David, Buenos Aires, Argentina
The David Agency and MACMA Argentina decided that a bold approach was required to remove any lingering social stigmas about an affliction that can be avoided or cured with early detection.
After long and thoughtful deliberations about how to creatively bypass legislative restrictions, Executive Creative Directors Joaquin Cubria, and Ignacio Ferioli, decided to take a calculated risk of imaginatively replacing the forbidden images of nipples, with singing mouths. It was a responsible risk that paid off handsomely.
‘Everybody Loves Boobs’, Directed by Argentinian filmmaking duo Tommy Quartino and Fran Colombatti, is surreal and decidedly bizarre.
Although some viewers proclaimed the commercial to be a grotesque send-up, the images are undeniably impactful, and effectively memorable.
Making headlines across the world for all the right reasons, ‘Everybody Loves Boobs’ broke through many of the social barriers concerning Breast Cancer awareness communication.