Breast cancer is the single biggest threat to women’s health in Sweden. It accounts for 30% of all cancers and has the second-highest death rate. But early detection reduces the risk of death significantly.

So regular self-checking is crucial for younger women, as starting preventative action at a young age forms life-long habits.

Dove is committed to educating and helping the next generation of women develop a positive relationship with their bodies. As a proud partner of the Swedish Cancer Society’s Pink Ribbon 2020, Dove wanted to connect with young women and educate them about the importance of self-checks and help make it part of their routine.

This was especially important in the middle of the pandemic as everyone’s has their attention around health focused elsewhere, but cancer doesn’t stop for COVID-19.

Whilst most young women are aware of the risk of breast cancer, they don’t know how to perform a self-check. Many just wait until they are over 40 and get called for hospital-based mammograms.

In Sweden, most other brands’ October Breast Cancer Awareness campaigns are just sales promotion campaigns dressed up as CSR. Few brands or partners directly tackle the behavioural issue at the root of the problem: to get more young women to start routinely performing self-checks.

Dove wanted to raise the bar for purposeful advertising and help tackle this problem by educating young women about the importance of conducting self-checks and actively engaging with them to show them exactly how to do it, step-by-step, in a fun interactive way.

This would help change behaviours and turn self-checks into a habitual process for young Swedish women, to help them spot any changes as soon as possible.

We needed to elicit a behavioural change in our audience, 18-35-year-old women, who weren’t regularly performing life-saving self-checks. To do this, we had to revolutionise traditionally boring breast-checking brochures and deliver the information in a dynamic, engaging format and ideally on an accessible app with interactive and sharing abilities.

Snapchat was identified as the ideal media platform and its AR Lenses the tool to bring our essential information to life in a fun interactive way. The AR set up would enable us to design an experience that would create a unique emotional connection with our audience by putting their bodies at the centre of the content. Plus, Snapchat is where our audience spends their time, where they love to engage with content and share it with their friends and where our important information could be delivered directly to them on their mobile phones.

Using Snapchat’s interactive Lenses, we created an educational Augmented Reality campaign to show young women how to examine their breasts for potential changes. The campaign launched during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, targeting 18–35-year-old Swedish women using Snapchat.

Our AR Body Lens showed users a step-by-step self-check guide, overlayed and mapped to their bodies. The Lens allowed women to perform self-checks in a discreet, safe environment without actively engaging the camera and accidentally recording themselves.

We also created a Face Lens for users to spread the word and share the guide, encouraging friends to #CheckYourself.

The combination of Lenses ensured more time was spent with the campaign, reinforcing Dove’s important message and its connection to the Pink Ribbon.

The Lens was bought on reach & frequency and auction, to maximize both reach and the number of shares. We combined this with Snap Ads to drive further awareness and clicks.

Our campaign successfully reached over 830,000 unique users with this important message, which is significant given the country has a small population with approximately 1.2 million 18–35-year-old women.

The average playtime using the Lens was 27 seconds vs the benchmark of 15-20 seconds, enough for users to actually perform a self-check. And just one self-check can be the start of a life-long habit.

A total of 373 hours was spent with the Lens during October.

Brand Lift study showed a 25% increase in Ad Awareness and 20% increase in Dove’s association with the Pink ribbon.

There was also a 14% lift in perception of ‘How purposeful Dove is’ and a 12% increase in penetration.

The Lens is now being rolled out to other markets to help increase breast cancer survival rates through early diagnosis.