We wanted to educate black South African women about breast cancer. One of the most accessible means for lower-income women to get information is via social media. Together with that, there are many social stigmas associated with the disease, so showcasing influential women helped us dispel fear and myths while making the lifesaving educational information about early detection available, relevant and accessible. All campaign collateral was created with a mobile-first experience in mind and took into account various data limitations women in South Africa face in order to ensure the information was able to cross the digital divide.

Black women have a lower incidence of breast cancer, but in Africa, due to a lack of education on how to detect the early signs, their mortality rate is much higher.

Jet, a fashion retailer with over 500 stores across Africa wanted to use its footprint and social media to reach black women to help save lives. Breast self-examinations are the most effective and affordable way to detect early breast cancer and prevent death, but how do we teach African women how to self-examine when breasts and nipples are censored on social media?

We needed a way to create a conversation with black women around breast cancer that would allow for open and honest dialogue to encourage education and ultimately drive self-examination and the seeking of professional medical care.

The BreastLace

Life-saving information was simply not reaching African women on a personal and relatable level. The solution was to create real, bare-breasted self-check tutorials featuring black women. But showing bare breasts, even for educational purposes is banned across all social networks.

In Africa, traditional gatherings and cultural practices celebrate bare breasts. That’s why social networks do allow breasts and nipples to be shown when women are wearing traditional necklaces.

Introducing The BreastLace. A traditional necklace that allowed us to make the first, bare-breasted, self-check video tutorials for African women, by African women and share them across all major social networks.

We created sharable, social media videos which are warm, down-to-earth and reassuring instead of cold, clinical and frightening - just real women with real breasts, talking without shame.

Jet’s purpose is to empower women by educating them on the importance of early detection. African women often lack access to health information that they can relate to. Social media has become the most effective way to reach and engage this audience. The only hurdle being censorship when showing breasts and nipples. We needed to innovate to find a way to give women access to our educational tutorials.

Our innovation was twofold:

1)The internet has been forced to allow women wearing traditional necklaces to display their breasts as this is a celebration of heritage. This created a loophole, so we created a traditional necklace, The BreastLace

2) We could only post organically due to showing nudity. To get around this we created a live feed on 1 October 2019 the first day of Breast Cancer Awareness Month

The BreastLace became the key to unlocking uncensored educational content, helping save lives.

From Women’s Month, Aug ’19 to the end of Breast Cancer Awareness Month in Oct ’19, Jet created awareness around the importance of conducting self-check examinations to detect early breast cancer. Together with the Breast Health Foundation and a team of influential women we set out to create the first, real, bare-breasted self-check educational tutorials for African women, by African women, accessible for all women via social media and YouTube, web and a month-long daily TV insert on one of South Africa’s leading TV shows, eTV’s The Morning Show.

Four inspiring tutorials were created with each influencer doing their bare-breasted self-checks while wearing The BreastLace on camera, led by a doctor, to show how anyone can learn to self-check, in easy and approachable, life-saving steps.

We used a combination of content & influencers to stimulate conversation for the duration of the campaign from 1 Aug – 8 Nov 2019.

Through media relations with the influencers and online conversations resulting from the campaign, additional coverage was received across social media and other channels, namely radio, print, web and national television interviews.

The results:

Combined distributed social media content received over the duration of the campaign was 2.7 million engagements.

Self-check tutorial campaign videos received 9 530 000 views, with 92% view-through rate on YouTube.

Breast Health Foundation (BHF) website traffic increased by 1158.3% and calls to the BHF call centre increased by 360%.

Total impressions online were 57 055 637.

Through traditional media platforms, we created a PR value of R3 204 468.

Total potential reach of The BreastLace Campaign amounted to 1 052 389 243.

Black women have a lower incidence of breast cancer, but in Africa, due to a lack of education on how to detect the early signs, their mortality rate is much higher. Breast self-examinations are the most effective and affordable way to detect early breast cancer and prevent death, but how do we teach African women how to self-examine when breasts and nipples are censored on social media? Bare breasts are celebrated in African traditions and cultures. That’s why social networks do allow bare breasts to be shown when women are wearing traditional necklaces. This social behaviour inspired the creation of The BreastLace. A traditional necklace that allowed us to make the first, bare-breasted, self-check video tutorials for African women, by African women and share them across all major social networks.