Health campaigns have a direct address problem. The more sensitive the topic, the more defences can go up. Mention breast cancer in a broadcast ad, and a portion of the audience tunes out. However put the instruction inside a bread recipe, a gaming controller, a bathhouse glove, or a bar of soap, and the same audience receives it more openly. Here are five creative tactics from the Change Behaviour Engine that leverage a tangible proxy: an object, context, or cultural norm to get the unsayable said.
- Borrow the Gesture
- Hijack the Ritual
- Recruit the Object
- Use the Moment of Maximum Relevance
- Repurpose the Device
1. Borrow the Gesture
Find a movement the audience already makes — and map the health behaviour onto it.
Bread Check — Spinneys Flour, Lebanon, 2021
In Lebanon, discussing women's bodies is culturally restricted — linguistic taboos make direct health communication about breast self-examination almost impossible. Spinneys Flour found the answer in the kitchen. A breadmaking tutorial published on YouTube demonstrated a traditional recipe while the kneading motions taught, exactly and wordlessly, the correct hand movements for a breast self-exam. The campaign was publicly praised by the Lebanese president and widely shared — not as a health campaign, but as a recipe.
Joystick Test (Liga Contra el Cáncer, DDB Colombia) mapped common gaming controller movements to breast and testicular self-examination techniques. Top streamers demonstrated both simultaneously on Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok, reaching young audiences who would never have engaged with conventional cancer awareness content. The audience's hands already knew the movements — they just needed to know where else those movements mattered.
2. Hijack the Ritual
Find the cultural practice already embedded in the audience's life — and embed the health message inside it.
Pink Glove — Kundal, Cheil Worldwide, South Korea
South Korean bathhouse culture includes Ttaemiri — a scrubbing ritual performed with textured gloves on the body. Kundal, working with Cheil Worldwide, distributed pink scrub gloves printed with simple breast self-examination instructions. Bathhouse staff were trained to demonstrate the technique safely. The campaign reached women through a ritual they already trusted, in a space already associated with intimate physical self-care. It didn't introduce a new behaviour — it redirected an existing one. The exam and the scrub used the same movements. The ritual already had them in the right position.
#TitCheck (YITTY x Young Survival Coalition, Science & Purpose, USA) found its ritual in the daily act of getting dressed. With the insight that 80% of breast cancers in young women are self-found — often while dressing — the campaign partnered with Lizzo's shapewear brand YITTY to turn outfit checks into breast checks. Educational guides, survivor interviews, and bold graphics were shared across Instagram and TikTok, making a private daily ritual a moment of health vigilance.
3. Recruit the Object
Put the message inside a product the audience handles without thinking — and the reminder arrives uninvited.
Breast Before Dates — Think Pink, Ireland
Irish women check food expiry labels habitually and automatically, as a routine part of shopping and cooking. Think Pink identified the behavioural gap: the same women who check best-before dates monthly had no comparable trigger for breast self-examination. Special labels shaped like breasts were placed near best-before dates on food packaging. QR codes linked to mobile tutorial content. The reminder arrived inside an existing routine, via an object already in the hand, asking for no new behaviour — just a redirect of attention that was already there. A new monthly reminder habit was created from an existing one.
