We are thrilled to announce that our body positivity campaign with adam&eveDDB and Instagram star Chessie King has won a Gold, Silver, and Bronze Lion award at this year's Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
The campaign in April launched with a post on Chessie's Instagram mentioning that she felt good about her body. It received over 150,000 views in the first few hours and created a huge amount of toxic and abusive comments.
Over the course of one day, Chessie's appearance was morphed in response to negative comments in a live Instagram story, showing how the impact of negative comments can have a detrimental effect on the way people see themselves. Every negative comment distorted Chessie's body even further until her natural beauty was transformed into an unrecognizable version of herself.
It was a great honor to have been invited to attend the Cannes Lions award ceremony on Tuesday night and to see Cybersmile's work being recognized on the global stage. Working with adam&eveDDB on this campaign was a dream come true, and we are proud to be able to help many people understand the consequences of their actions online as well as create a powerful reminder of how unrealistic 'perfect' can be! Congratulations to all the winners this year. We saw some truly inspiring campaigns.
Iain Alexander, Head of Engagement, The Cybersmile Foundation
The campaign garnered international acclaim, being recognized in the Top 5 Ads of the Week alongside Nike and Deadpool by Fast Company and was featured in publications including Ad Week, The Huffington Post, and Mashable. The video of Chessie's transformation was also highlighted by some of the world's most recognized video publishers, including NowThis, Pretty 52, 9Gag, and MSN, receiving over 6.9 million views.
The body positivity campaign picked up a total of three awards in the Mobile Lions category, including:
- Gold Lion - Social Influencer/Talent
- Silver Lion - Social Purpose
- Bronze Lion - Social Trends
Along with leading advertising agencies, brands, and organizations, our campaign was showcased at the Théâtre Claude Debussy at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes in front of an audience of 2000 attendees.
Other award winners at this year's Cannes Lions included the Elton John Legacy campaign, Trash Isles (LADBible), Donald Trump's Twitter Library (Comedy Central), FCK campaign (KFC), Price on Our Lives (March For Our Lives), The Bulletproof Flag campaign (Black Lives Matter), Welcome to @Apple (Apple), and This Coke is a Fanta (Coca Cola).
We want to say a huge thank you to everybody at adam&eveDDB and Cheesie King for helping make the campaign such a big success.