Tens of thousands of Canadians participated in Beauty Gives Back‘s “Wink” campaign last week to support female cancer patients with the cancer blues.
Participants had their eyes covered in blue eye shadow by makeup artists in a van traveling across Toronto, as well as in 370 Shoppers Drug Mart locations across Canada, to raise awareness of the emotional trauma cancer patients suffer as their appearances change with treatment.
“The response was amazing,” said Michael Scher, founder of The Conversation Farm, the creative agency behind the campaign. “A lot of people came up to us on the street and wanted to know where they could donate.”
Beauty Gives Back is the charitable arm of the Canadian beauty industry. It’s goal was to raise awareness and funds for the charity’s Look Good Feel Better program, where makeup artists travel to more than 1,000 clinics across Canada to teach cancer patients how to use makeup to maintain a healthy appearance.
Scher said, “When you have cancer, you’re a walking billboard. You can’t escape it. It’s not about putting on lipstick so you can go out for cocktails, it’s about putting on makeup so your children don’t think they’re sitting next to their mother who’s dying.”
Scher’s agency was approached by Beauty Gives Back more than a year ago to increase awareness for Look Good Feel Better. “People who had been treated by the program, which numbered in excess of 200,000 over the past 20 years, were universally in love with it. But everybody else had never heard of it, and when you first mentioned it to them, they didn’t have a very positive reaction,” he said. After all, it seems strange that when someone learns they have cancer, the first thing the program does is offer beauty tips.
So The Conversation Farm created the Wink campaign to start the conversation about what Scher’s team decided to call the cancer blues, “which was our way of naming the malady. Creating something that wasn’t scientific, that people could understand and relate to and get right away.”
The agency partnered with Jam Van to create the mobile activation of the campaign that travelled across Toronto between June 16 and 19. In combination with the Shoppers Drug Mart partnership, Scher estimates participation was in the tens of thousands and reach was almost 3.5 million.
In addition, he said there were around 40 million impressions through paid, unpaid, earned media and social media.
Participants could get their makeup done for free, though many donated to Beauty Gives Back. And with every selfie taken (of which Scher says there were more than 10,000), the Canadian beauty industry pledged $5. It also donates more than $6 million annually to Look Good Feel Better.
Even though Scher said participants and those on the street were handing over their money, “it wasn’t about revenue. The goal was just to start this conversation about the cancer blues and it succeeded beyond our wildest imagination.”
