As a leading oral care brand, Colgate believes every smile is beautiful – whether you’ve got gap teeth, buck teeth, ‘fangs’, misaligned teeth, or whatever the world deems imperfect. But reality is, 94% of people in Asia-Pacific feel they can’t smile freely. Among this group, 2 in 5 have experienced smile shame – they feel bad about how their teeth look, mainly due to the influence of social media, and comments made by people around them.

We wanted to lead the change in the oral care industry, by raising awareness of smile shaming, and breaking the stereotype of what a beautiful smile means. We also set out to increase engagement with and positive sentiment of the Colgate brand.

The best way to fight smile shame, is to keep on smiling. We decided to adapt our logo – which featured a smile – to celebrate everyone’s unique smiles. We even created an A.I.-powered Colgate Smile generator, trained with over 15,000 orthodontic photos. So it could accurately trace anyone’s smile into a personalised shareable Colgate Smile. Each generated smile became a badge of confidence, and was shared along with personal stories to help fight smile shame. We created a movement where we not only celebrated smiles everywhere, but also empowered people to talk about their struggles and challenges.

Advertising, particularly oral care communication, plays a huge role in shaping how society perceives what beautiful teeth look like. Brands have been featuring stereotypical teeth talents, reinforcing the belief that only the most aesthetically-pleasing teeth should be celebrated. As a leading oral care brand, we wanted to lead the change. Our strategy was to start by looking at our very own smile on our logo, our biggest and most valuable brand identity asset. We chose to adapt it to everyone's smiles on World Smile Day. Empowering people to put their smiles out there, and fought back with them against smile shame. Our key message was simple, "There's no smile like yours".

We launched our campaign on an occasion that celebrates smiles, but has never been owned by a brand – World Smile Day. First, we leveraged PR to share our research findings on ‘Smile Shame’ in Asia-Pacific. Key opinion leaders then shared their personal smile shame stories through social media, encouraging more people to open up on their own experiences. Following that, our main ATL campaign celebrating unique smiles was launched. Influencers, social content and digital OOH extended the invitation for everyone to join the movement against smile shaming – simply by using our Colgate Smile Generator to create personalised Colgate Smiles they could proudly share. We even created toothpaste packs featuring personalised logos for those who had been smile shamed. Within Colgate, we initiated an internal employee engagement program, where employees shared their personal smile shame stories on LinkedIn.

Our campaign overturned negative conversations about smile shame, changing the narrative to smile empowerment instead.

PR and Social Reach and Engagement:

Campaign resonated deeply with reach of over 899 million (surpassing expectations by 21X) // Generated >1,200 articles (35X ROI of investment) aligned with core messages // 100% positive sentiments for PR // +14%–29% engagement in key markets

Personal Resonance and Effectiveness:

Authentic creator content led to significant uplift in media effectiveness. // 220% increase in views, 123-300% increase in clicks on TikTok and Meta platforms in key markets

Advocacy Empowerment:

Empowering advocates to combat smile shaming by fighting back with a smile, AI Smile Generator created 2.4K smile stickers and 2.3K hashtags // Conversations initiated by Key Opinion Leaders generated 94% positive response

Impactful Communication:

Significant 10.4% uplift in Brand Association with World Smile Day on TikTok.