7 Powerful Ads from The Looking Glass

Ayman Helweh
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DDB Vancouver has created a hard-hitting awareness campaign for The Looking Glass Foundation for Eating Disorders.

They use the tag line, “Not every suicide note looks like one.”

The campaign asks us to pay attention to the small signs that indicate a friend or relative is suffering from an eating disorder. The comprehensive campaign consists of print ads, TV spots, and ambient unconventional efforts.

Let’s start with the TV spots: Pencil Marks (which you can watch above) shows a girl obsessed with drawing her midriff/belly contours on the wall using a pencil to track how fat/thin she is getting. Dinner Plans and Scales (which you can watch below) show a thin young woman lying to her mom on the phone about already having eaten dinner, and a young thin swimmer weighing herself and writing her alarmingly low weight on a note on the wall, respectively. 

The ambient campaign placed items such as broken toothbrushes (see fourth image below) in plastic bags in a department store change rooms and restaurant washrooms in Vancouver. A note is printed on the bag, “Attempting to purge, Jane B., broke a toothbrush off in her throat and choked.” Other items left in these places include a hairbrush full of hair and a message, “People with anorexia lose much more than weight,” and a spool of thread, revealing “In an effort to end a self-destructive cycle of binging and purging Monica D. passed out attempting to sew her lips shut.”

The print ads (images 5, 6, & 7 below) show practices such as having a meal plan that list the calories of everything you eat, tracking your weight on each day of the calendar, and writing an angry diary entry for eating too much that day and wanting to be normal.