To combat a culture of harassment against women in Brazil, L'Oréal Paris created a training program and worked with the largest entertainment company in Latina America to integrate iconography across nostalgic content, highlighting instances of antiquated misogynistic behavior.
Objective
Street harassment is a worldwide problem that affects women. In Brazil, 88 percent of women have experienced harassment in public places. Exacerbating the issue are the deviant behaviors often normalized by popular older Brazilian movies, series, and soap operas on streaming services and TV. While older content arouses feelings of nostalgia and admiration in a large part of the Brazilian population, they also help propagate behaviors that are no longer acceptable, such as the normalization of public harassment.
L'Oréal Paris, a brand that has been fighting alongside women for years, wanted to help change this reality. That's why it brought the "Stand Up" platform to Brazil, an anti-harassment training program. Moreover, the brand wanted to integrate its anti-harassment sentiment across the aforementioned content to educate the public and promote its new training.
Target Audience
L'Oréal Paris' Stand Up training platform was aimed at men and women aged 18 and older. For this reason, it was important to address L'Oréal Paris' message in a way that would reach this entire target.
Creative and Media Strategy
How could a 10-second ad change the context of an entire motion picture? This is the power of media and L'Oréal Paris used it to combat street harassment. The brand created "Harassment Advisory" — an innovative use of pre-roll ads and other short formats to integrate L'Oréal Paris' message into classic and beloved content, transforming miseducation into information.
L'Oréal Paris developed a set of visual icons highlighting specific kinds of street harassment, including:
Then the brand partnered with Televisa's Vix, Latin America's largest entertainment company, to integrate the icons across 5,000 hours of classic TV shows, movies, series, soap operas and more. Through short formats only, like pre-roll and mid-roll ads, L'Oréal used the iconography to label the content and promote its message. The partnership also spawned the creation of a special session on the platform that held the brand's educational content. What's more, since Harassment Advisory was launched as an open-source initiative, other streaming services, TV channels, and production companies are also able to adopt the program, which makes the project scalable.
L'Oréal Paris reinforced its mission to fight for respect for women and its campaign will become a federal law that will change the way Brazilian culture refers to harassment against women. Through its partnership with Televisa's Vix, the brand's Harassment advisories reached over 6 million viewers in just a month.
L'Oréal also invited media and production companies that didn't participate in the project to its free anti-harassment training. This bought its Stand Up platform to 20,000 more people across the entertainment industry. What's more, the national debate reached congresswoman Laura Carneiro who will advocate for Harassment Advisory to become law, forcing all streaming services to join L'Oréal's initiative.
