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Encouraging everyone to love their eyes
The number of people with poor vision is increasing rapidly across the globe. Sight loss has nearly doubled in recent decades, growing from around 560 million in 1990 to over 1.1 billion today.
The client
IAPB:
seeks to highlight the importance of eye health.
The challenge
Children worldwide are experiencing preventable vision problems. Globally, at least 450 million children have a sight condition that needs treatment, with 90 million living with some form of sight loss.
About a half of blindness in children below the age of 15 could have been prevented or could be managed if the child had access to eye care services.
We know that there remains a stigma around visual impairment and wearing glasses, but greater education around eye health can help to challenge this.
IAPB asked 89up for global communications support for the annual World Sight Day and to promote the importance of eye health.
The solution
Wearing glasses when you need them is one of the most effective ways to preserve your vision. Yet people with glasses are met with stereotypes of being a ‘nerd’, and children with glasses are more likely to be bullied in school. The stigma means many don’t wear their glasses even though they need them.
For World Sight Day 2022, we worked with Lowri Moore - the young girl who previously inspired Disney to create a main character with glasses - to tackle stigma once again.
This time, she would challenge the popular “nerd face” emoji, asking big tech to create more positive emojis with #GlassesOn.
The impact
89up saw the project through from ideation to execution, shaping the campaign to Lowri’s style, supporting in drafting the letter to the tech companies, coordinating a media event, and doing the full sell in.
Lowri’s campaign was featured across the UK media landscape and internationally.
The BBC’s video about her was one of the most watched online on the BBC’s website on World Sight Day, and the campaign gained significant traction on social media due to the coverage.
Following the campaign, Meta changed the emoji on WhatsApp for Android.
