What it had to solve
For Breast Cancer Awareness Month, educate teens and young adults about breast health, dispel myths and answer the questions they are embarrassed to ask, in an engaging interactive format.
The idea
The calculator spelling of BOOBIES becomes #8008135, a modern spin on a retro hotline: the first breast health bot, answering questions in the audience's own code
How it works
A social-driven program built around the first breast health bot, dispensing sound advice through colourful pink-hued cartoon drawings. An accompanying 'Broken Telephone' video shows four girls panicking each other with myths — cell phones, underwire bras, antiperspirant, coffee. #8008135 T-shirts raise money for the cause.
What it did
No results figures were reported in launch coverage. The campaign set out to defuse young adults' myth-driven panic with facts during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, with merchandise funding the education.
Background
For Breast Cancer Awareness Month 2017, non-profit Rethink Breast Cancer and agency Sid Lee launched #8008135 — BOOBIES spelled on a calculator, 'a trick as old as calculators themselves' — a socially driven campaign to educate young adults across the globe about breast health.
The program was built on research by Rethink Breast Cancer and Asking Canadians with 800+ teens across the US and Canada, which showed young adults overestimate their risk of breast cancer and do not know the actual facts.
#8008135 is a modern spin on a retro 'hotline', revolving around the first breast health bot, built to bust myths and answer breast health questions through colourful pink-hued cartoon drawings. A film, 'Broken Telephone', shows four girls scaring each other with myths about cell phones, underwire bras, antiperspirant and coffee, while T-shirts carrying the #8008135 logo raise money.
Why it lands
The calculator joke is pre-loaded nostalgia, so the campaign's name spreads itself.
A bot lets young people ask the questions they would never ask an adult, anonymously and in tone.
The 'Broken Telephone' film shows myth-panic as it spreads, dramatising the problem the bot solves.
Merchandise turns supporters into media and funders at once.
What you can take
Borrow a code your audience already shares — calculator-spelled BOOBIES — and health education arrives disguised as an in-joke they want to pass on.
Since then
The Drum's launch coverage reported no performance figures; the campaign ran during Breast Cancer Awareness Month across the US and Canada.
FOLLOW THE EVIDENCE