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2019 One Show - Creative Effectiveness

#DefyTheName

Agency BBDO / New York + OPositive + DiniVonMuefflingCommunications

Client Monica Lewinsky/ Anti-Bullying
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Annual ID

OS_CE19026M

About the Work

For almost two decades Monica Lewinsky did her best to avoid the spotlight, though she was never really out of the headlines. But today, Monica has become a powerful anti-bullying advocate. She’s channeled her own experience with feelings of humiliation, hopelessness, and isolation into a battle against public shaming. In 2017, Monica and a coalition of 12 anti-bullying nonprofits launched their first PSA to encourage people to treat each other with the same compassion online as they would in real life. Building on her momentum as an anti-bullying advocate, Monica wanted her next campaign to be more personal. She wanted to speak directly to the people who were feeling the same way she did so many years ago: those feeling humiliated by the hurtful names that they are being called; those feeling alone; and those who are losing hope that things will ever get better. The truth is, everybody has been bullied at some point. But not everybody let it define them. Her objective: to inspire resilience in those who are feeling humiliated, isolated and hopeless due to bullying. How we would achieve this: Anti-Bullying efforts have frequently focused on stopping the bully and rarely on empowering the victim. The reality is that we cannot control the actions of others, but we can help those in need cope and feel supported. That is how we landed on our insight: having hope that things will get better helps put bullying in perspective and those suffering stay resilient. With this insight, we embarked on a campaign to disarm bullies of their most common tactic: name calling. The idea: Don’t let bullying define you. How the idea became more than a PSA and created a movement: The campaign, #DefyTheName kicked off with a film showing that some of the most successful people out there were also called names, but they didn’t let that define who they became. But the PSA was only the beginning. The campaign grew into an online movement when Monica Lewinsky changed her Twitter name on live television to the hurtful names she was called at the peak of her public humiliation: “Monica Chunky Slut Stalker That Woman Lewinsky.” This name change was a ‘thumb-stopper’ on Twitter, and PR coverage of the change spread like wildfire. Soon after, many celebrities and influencers -- including Olivia Munn, Tony Hawk, and Questlove -- and thousands of people did the same, reinforcing the key message of the campaign: you are not alone and the names you’re called don’t define you. The results: By calling on successful celebrities to reveal the hurtful names that they have once been called, we inspired hope and community for those that need it most. 1. We successfully created buzz: With a media budget that consisted of zero dollars, we needed to develop a campaign that would create buzz and PR. That’s where our reach, and our impact, needed to come from. On the day that the campaign launched, #DefyTheName trended on Twitter. Within the first two weeks, the campaign received over 1 Billion impressions. It got covered by over 430 publications and news outlets, including Forbes, The Washington Post, CNN, ABC News, USA Today, Vanity Fair, People Magazine, and Fast Company. In the first five days, it was shared by more than 290 influencers on social media. And thousands of brave people shared the hurtful names that they were bullied with, taking ownership of the campaign and igniting a conversation about how painful it is to be bullied among their peer group. 2. Most importantly, we inspired people to #defythename: The ultimate test of any idea would be if it inspired hope in people that they too could defy the names that have been used against them.. In a pre/post campaign survey to understand the effect that the campaign had on those that were exposed to it, 53% said they felt inspired to not let the names that they were called affect them. And with seeing that so many others have gone through the same experiences that they have, 47% said that they felt less alone and 40% said they felt less shame about the names that they were called.