Ladies’s well being has been prime of thoughts at PRWeek for a while now and it’s an space the place sensible PR and communication helps facilitate important and lengthy overdue change.
First up, Unilever’s #TurnYourBack marketing campaign for its Dove model received Marketing campaign of the 12 months on the twenty fifth anniversary PRWeek U.S. Awards, in addition to Greatest in Integration and Greatest in Inventive Excellence. Mockingly, it didn’t win Greatest in Healthcare.
The marketing campaign tackled the generative AI-based Daring Glamour filter that flooded TikTok with distorted photos of individuals’s faces airbrushed to a single magnificence customary. The development brought about important psychological and psychological well being harm, particularly amongst women, and led to a lot decrease vanity for many who distorted their footage than those that didn’t.
Dove turned the social dialog on its head and enlisted influential TikTok creators and celebrities to #TurnYourBack on the glamor filter development. It additionally introduced it could by no means use AI in its communication.
Final week, in London, on the PRWeek World Awards ceremony, Nosotras Las Mujeres received Marketing campaign of the 12 months for its PADvertising for Change interval tax activation in Costa Rica. It additionally received in a number of different classes.
The marketing campaign acknowledged that categorizing interval merchandise below a luxurious tax bracket rendered them unaffordable to at least one in 5 of the inhabitants, which means hundreds of Costa Ricans missed days of labor or faculty after they had been on their interval. Except for the associated fee, it is simply mistaken.
The idea of PADvertising was conceived, utilizing the phrase “Cambiemos la regla” – let’s change the legislation/interval. Folks participated within the protest and lobbied authorities to take motion.
In 4 weeks, roughly 90% of the nation’s inhabitants and 48 out of 57 congress members voted to cross the legislation. The 13% tax on Costa Rica’s interval merchandise was abolished and a dedication to free menstrual merchandise in public faculties and prisons was secured.
At PRWeek’s Healthcare Convention this week, social media influencer and August interval merchandise co-founder Nadya Okamoto added context to the interval tax difficulty from a U.S. perspective in dialog with PRWeek senior reporter Jess Ruderman.
She recalled campaigning towards the posh gross sales tax on interval merchandise that considers them to be luxurious items quite than important merchandise, whereas merchandise focused at males corresponding to Rogaine and Viagra are thought-about medical requirements for tax functions.
Governors informed Okamoto: “We don’t suppose this is a matter individuals care about.” It’s a standard chorus and one other instance of the way in which ladies’s well being has traditionally been, and nonetheless is, thought-about much less of a difficulty than males’s well being.
The theme continued via the day and the convention ended with a nice session hosted by Weber Shandwick’s Jamie Dowd, later named Company Healthcare Skilled of the 12 months within the PRWeek Healthcare Awards, in dialog with Let’s Discuss Menopause CEO and founder, Donna Klassen.
Klassen defined how the idea of menopause remains to be thought-about taboo in on a regular basis society and why her nonprofit destigmatizes this pure course of for girls by offering training and advocacy via public consciousness with the phrase “It’s not simply in your head.”
The marketing campaign highlights widespread signs of menopause corresponding to sizzling flashes, irritability and urinary tract infections, in addition to lesser-known signs corresponding to painful intercourse, joint ache and mind fog. Klassen additionally talked about perimenopause and the necessity to unify ladies who could also be present process signs however are unaware they’re associated to phases of menopause.
As is usually the case in these circumstances, addressing ladies’s well being can also be good economically. Whereas launching Weber’s North America Ladies’s Well being Middle of Excellence, Dowd cited a January report by McKinsey that discovered investments addressing the ladies’s well being hole might increase the worldwide financial system by $1 trillion yearly by 2040.
Disinformation and misinformation had been fixed themes all through the day and I interviewed Dr. Mike Varshavski on stage for a dwell version of The PR Week podcast.
Dr. Mike claims an viewers of 25 million individuals throughout his social media channels and famous that he acquired six million views for a video he did with Dr. Anthony Fauci throughout COVID-19, which compares very favorably with mainstream media shops corresponding to ABC Information that “wrestle to get 100,000.”
His goal when he arrange his channel virtually a decade in the past was to make medical media correct however enjoyable and he does an awesome line in demystifying matters and counteracting the mass of egregious data on the market on platforms together with TikTok.
Speaking about his content material partnerships with firms and well being manufacturers he mentioned: “The viewers has modified. You’ll be able to’t serve synthetic content material. Folks have turn out to be accustomed to faux content material so they need you to be clear that it’s an advert.”
Different problems with notice lined on the convention included well being fairness and inclusive communication, the weight-loss drug revolution and social media marcomms.
Healthcare PR execs are on the slicing fringe of all these points and way more, in addition to combating disinformation and misinformation — it’s so good to see their necessary work getting the popularity it deserves.