Each member of the LGBTQ+ community comes from a unique walk of life—and no one understands those stories better than LGBTQ folks themselves. That’s why the Who We Are video series showcases real people telling us about their lives in their own voices.
This Free Life is an LGBTQ young adult tobacco prevention brand, created in honor of the tens of thousands of LGBTQ lives cut short by tobacco EVERY YEAR. This message is crucial, and we relied on the power of story to get the point across.
The objective of the Who We Are series was to help our audience understand that being authentically LGBTQ doesn’t need to include tobacco. We designed this series to engage our audience with shared truths and use authentic LGBTQ voices to encourage a tobacco-free lifestyle.
“I was made to feel not normal. I got caught up in the wrong friend group, so when they started smoking cigarettes, I just wanted to stay normal to them.”
Matt is one of seven influential LGBTQ community members who agreed to share their real stories with This Free Life. Each Who We Are video features someone like Matt—authentic people sharing their journey toward a healthy lifestyle. They sit in a minimal room, and behind them we see a huge wall covered in tiny identity words like queer, complex, valid.
Seven unscripted :60 videos (and two :30 mashups) were shared across This Free Life’s owned social channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube—the places we know LGBTQ young adults spend their time). These organic posts received paid promotion to push the personal stories into the feeds of new LGBTQ users. Our storytellers shared Who We Are on their own social channels.
At the end of each video, the influencers proudly stated their hard-won salient identities, and added their own words to the wall. When zoomed out, we see letters in negative space: PROUD TO BE.
The message was further extended through integration at local events. In eight markets, the wall of words was installed at branded events in LGBTQ nightlife venues where attendees were encouraged to add their own proud descriptors to the collection. These events gave new life to the tobacco-free message and gave LGBT young adults the chance to interact with the creative, share their stories, and own their identities proudly.
The Who We Are series generated meaningful engagement with multiple subpopulations of our LGBTQ audience. These posts received 40% more comments than our previous content, indicating that the brand’s focus on raw, personal content seemed to draw active responses from our target.
Audience comments ranged from personal tobacco-free stories, public decisions to become tobacco-free, expressions of inspiration, and encouragement to fellow LGBTQ young folks to live healthy lives:
“You’re an inspiration! I’ve been trying to quit and haven’t had a cigarette in 3 days! <3”
“I quit 3-30-17. I was diagnosed with lung cancer 10-26-18. It was a little too late. The journey is hard. It doesn’t have to be too late for you.”
Thanks in part to our event activations, influencer reposts, and the earnest tone of the videos, Who We Are overall garnered 242K+ video views, 4.7K+ social reactions, and 151 comments across all of our platforms—outperforming previous content and showing our audience that real LGBTQ folks can lead tobacco-free lives.
