The MTV Video Music Awards always puts on the ultimate show fueled by superficial glitz, glamour and drama. There are typically some moments that take place throughout the show that are not good examples for teen girls to follow. The brief was for Clean & Clear to utilize their official sponsorship to change the conversation by sending a message of love and self acceptance. The creative idea was to make a :60 film that gave real girls the stage to talk about self acceptance. The takeaway of the film was that the best acceptance speeches are the ones we give ourselves.

The film was unscripted and edited using segments from in-depth one-on-one personal interviews conducted in the girls’ own bedrooms, creating one seamless point of view from the girls themselves about how hard it is to be a teen and the importance of accepting your flaws with grace and optimism.

The story begins with girls envisioning the speeches they would give when accepting an award and progresses to these girls accepting awkward traits they are self-conscious about.

The film concluded with a hashtag, #SelfAcceptanceSpeech, to encourage viewers to take a break from commenting on the celebrities and events on stage and tweet the awkward things they accepted about themselves.

The #SelfAcceptanceSpeech message immediately hit home achieving more than 110MM impressions in just two days as media outlets, influencers, moms and girls praised the brand’s message.

#SelfAcceptanceSpeech outperformed nearly all other branded Twitter programs in 2015, with message association scores in the 95th percentile and an engagement rate of 12% nearly double the Twitter brand benchmark of 5%.(should this say over double instead of nearly double?) Also, I’m not sure it was the Twitter brand benchmark, I would assume it was the industry benchmark but I can’t find any evidence to confirm. Is it okay if you leave it as Twitter brand benchmark given that?

Remarkably, even though a product was not mentioned in the activation, the brand saw an immediate lift in consumption the following week and a +2 point lift in sales month-over-month.

Also, we saw a 31% increase in purchase intent amongst those