A Difficult Message to Convey

During my years in advertising, I have few opportunities to work on social advertising but I enjoyed those sporadic occasions more than anything else, because those are the most challenging campaigns you can ever have.

Nevertheless -as with everything else-, some social issues are more difficult than others. Two topics I find extremely hard are AIDS and eating disorders: in both cases there are prejudices that you have to fight against, there is a lot of information that you need to give and it tends to be difficult to convey the message in a serious way without going into extremes.

For that reason when I saw this ad from the UK (that was shown in an Argentine news show), I was pretty impressed by how well they managed to send a useful message.

This is the TV ad for the campaign...

As you can see it uses the general misconception ("You can never be too thin"), it is not too creepy or too dark, but it gives enough information to take interested parties to the website, where more information is available.

The print ads are also pretty good; a great copy presenting the illness to those that can actually help before is too late. The one below is one of the several ads that are part of the campaign:

Barbie - Coincidence?

At their website, "Don't die for a diet" you can find the rest of the ads as well as good information on how this disease affects young girls and what parents can do to spot the problem on time.