In the age of the 24/7 news cycle, we had to drive awareness and participation around a complex issue with little time and almost zero budget.

Our solution: focus primarily on one channel (Twitter), create a hashtag that functions as a call-to-action (#AskPharma) and employ a creative device designed to spotlight Big Pharma’s lack of transparency (an ASCII symbol that allowed us to hide information in our posts, resulting in the internet’s first-ever “Redacted Tweets.”).

Through pointed questions around pricing addressed to @Pfizer and @GSK — with keywords blacked out — we delivered a simple, effective way to pressure Big Pharma.

This campaign was promoted on the main site afairshot.org and on MSF's twitter accounts. On Twitter, users were able to use #AskPharma, a hashtag that functions as an ASCII symbol that hid information in our posts, resulting in the internet’s first-ever “Redacted Tweets.” The campaign generated 8,000-plus tweets, reaching more than 70 million people around the world.

In just a few short weeks, our Redacted Tweets/#AskPharma initiative:

• Resulted in more than 8,000 original tweets

• Collectively reached over 70 million people.

• Forced Pfizer and GSK to come out of hiding and issue official statements to defend their opaque pricing structures

• Helped convince 60 countries at the 2015 World Health Assembly to adopt a resolution calling for a more affordable vaccine