The Ad Council launched the Love Has No Labels campaign with a simple message – rethink the biases you didn't even know you had. Ultimately, we sought to promote acceptance and appreciation of all communities regardless of race, religion, gender, sexuality, age and ability by raising awareness for implicit biases. Since we were launching a brand new campaign, our main goal was to create awareness about the issue and the campaign. We drove video viewers to the campaign website, which features a quiz where you can examine your own biases and find resources on how to get involved.
We partnered with Upworthy for an exclusive debut of the initial campaign video on their Facebook channel to reach an audience who was inclined to like and share the video to help spread our campaign messages. The emotional video showed dancing skeletons behind a custom-built, simulated x-ray screen before revealing people from different backgrounds embracing to show that before anything else we are all human.
Since the initial video debuted exclusively on Upworthy's Facebook page, it has been viewed over 160 million times making it the 2nd most viewed video of 2015. Additionally, it was the 2nd most viral video on Facebook, the 4th most viewed on YouTube and one of the best performing Upworthy videos of all time. It won eight Cannes Lions and 11 Clio Awards and within days of the initial video launch, the message was shared by influencers including the First Lady Michelle Obama, George Takei, Deepak Chopra and Mario Goetz. As a result, there have been over 2.7 million sessions on lovehasnolabels.com. To date, more than 1,000 personal stories have been shared one the website's social gallery and the hashtag #lovehasnolabels has been used over 30,000 times generating over 110 million potential impressions.
The campaign launch and video received strong earned media support with placements across press and broadcast valued at $6.4 million in coverage. High profile broadcast coverage includes ABC's World News Tonight, Good Morning America and CNN. Influential press outlets include The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Mashable, Adweek, Ad Age, Los Angeles Times, and others. In total, the campaign has generated more than 1 billion media impression to raise awareness of implicit bias.
