Marie Claire Australia reassures young women to love their bodies from early age

The Australian Marie Claire, the women’s lifestyle magazine, has collaborated with six local advertising agencies for the campaign aiming to help younger female audience build self-esteem. The initiative inspires women to love their bodies from early age, even during tough life periods such as puberty, when they might feel clumsy and not attractive.

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Photo: Marie Claire’s #whywait visual by OgilvyOne (click to enlarge)

The initiative was inspired by the statistics, saying that the average woman in Australia learns to like her body only by the age of 45—but for a healthy physical and mental life it’s essential to develop self esteem in early years. For this project, the magazine has partnered with OgilvyOne, Publicis Mojo, M&C Saatchi Australia, Airborne, Whybin\TBWA and DDB Group Sydney. Each of the agencies produced their own posters—photos or watercolors with manifestos printed in black type against white background—to emphasize the importance of accepting who you are and how you look. See all the works here along with the comments from the agencies.

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Photo: Marie Claire’s #whywait visual by DDB Sydney (click to enlarge)

Most of the visuals go with the messages that communicate the unhealthiness and unnaturalness of body image, encouraging women to start a conversation in social media, upload their photos to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram using the hashtags #whywait, #marie_claire_au and #nofilterme.

“It’s well-worn territory. There’s been a lot of attempts of addressing this issue, Dove’s doing and it doing it really well but the impact that they’re having clearly isn’t from an issue point of view, they’re still trying to sell product, they’re still promoting their brand, commented OgilvyOne creative director Rob Morrison. “What we wanted was a completely fresh way in, to find a way of looking at the issue and get to the heart of it in a way that hadn’t been discussed before or looked at before and that’s where we got to with the whole education approach to it. This isn’t in the DNA of women to compare themselves unrealistically to unachievable images, it’s something that women through lots of different sources are taught or taught themselves.”

With this effort, Marie Claire is following in the footsteps of British Vogue which rolled out a similar educational campaign in the UK last September in schools. This trend was also analyzed in Top 6 trends in social fields in 2013 with predictions.