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effieworldwide · 5 years

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Winner Spotlight: “The Bridal Uniform” by UN Women & BBDO Pakistan

November 14, 2019

2019 Effie Awards Pakistan GRAND EFFIE

Child marriage threatens the education and safety of thousands of girls every year. In Pakistan, activists had been long campaigning to outlaw the practice.

In 2017, UN Women (The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women) set out to call lawmakers to action. Partnering with BBDO Pakistan, they organized a surprise takeover at Bridal Couture Week, one of Pakistan’s biggest annual events, to debut “The Bridal Uniform.”

“The Bridal Uniform” propelled the issue of child marriage to headlines and reignited the national debate. The work earned the Grand Effie in the inaugural Effie Awards Pakistan competition in 2019, and took home Silver at the 2019 APAC Effies (regional) in the Positive Change: Social Good – Non-Profit category.

Read on to hear from Jamshed M. Kazi, former UN Women Country Representative to Pakistan, and Ali Rez, Regional Executive Creative Director, Middle East and Pakistan at BBDO Pakistan, for more insight on this Effie-winning work.

Effie: What were your objectives for “The Bridal Uniform”?

JK: 21% of girls in Pakistan are married before the age of 18 and 3% are married before the age of 15. Apart from the adverse impacts this has on their health, education, rights, and overall well-being, it is estimated that ending this practice could lead to a $US 6 billion increase in national income. The issue of child marriage has been well documented and many international and national development actors have been working relentlessly for many years to bring about positive change.

The main objective of the campaign was to spark a conversation among a wider audience, especially influencers and policy makers who would normally not be familiar with or have been advocates supporting the cause of ending child marriage. Marriage is a momentous occasion in any person’s life and it ought to be celebrated, as it typically is in Pakistan with fanfare and ceremony, but it was important for people to recognize that not all brides (or grooms for that matter) ought to be celebrated, especially if this comes at the price of depriving them of their right to health, education, and livelihood opportunities.

Effie: What was the strategic insight that led to your big idea?

AR: Data shows that education can be one of the most powerful tools to help girls avoid child marriages, and fulfill their potential. The longer a girl stays in school, the less likely she is to be married before the age of 18 and have children during her teenage years. We used this strategic angle to build our idea.

The insight came from the typical Pakistani bride herself, who traditionally wears an elaborate wedding outfit — bright, colorful, heavily embroidered dresses with flashy jewelry. Every year, the Pakistani bridal-wear fashion industry hosts large events in which new styles are revealed by big name designers. Dresses sometimes sell for millions of rupees. These shows are typically attended by local celebrities and have extensive media coverage.

There is an incredible amount of attention given to the outfit a bride will wear to her wedding, and it takes up most of the conversation in marriage planning, in every demographic in Pakistan. One could say that the bridal gown in itself is treated as a uniform for a bride. We took this insight and connected it to the other uniform that a young girl wears, one that is positive for her life: the school uniform.

Effie: How did you bring “The Bridal Uniform” to life?

AR: In collaboration with the nation's best known bridal-wear artist Ali Xeeshan, we meticulously designed a new kind of a bridal outfit — one that symbolises the trade-off that takes place when a girl is married young and is deprived of her right to an education.

“The Bridal Uniform” had been crafted by merging traditional Pakistani wedding outfit embroidery patterns with a schoolgirl's uniform.

We then hijacked the platform of the country’s biggest bridal fashion show evening: the Bridal Couture Week. As the showstopper of the night, amidst bejeweled adult brides in elaborate gowns, and with the nation's top fashion bloggers recording, out walked on the ramp a little girl wearing a Pakistani schoolgirl's uniform embellished with beautiful traditional bridal motifs. The irony in the piece was unmistakable.

An online petition was launched to advocate a change in law in order to protect young girls, all in an effort to reach lawmakers in the government.

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Effie: How did you know the work worked? What was the most significant or surprising result of the effort?

JK: The pre-adolescent girl model who ‘gate crashed’ one of Pakistan’s most well attended and high-profile bridal fashion shows, adorned in jewelry and wearing her school uniform along with other glamour models on the ramp, very quickly became mainstream news, both nationally and internationally. In part, this re-ignited a discussion within the National Assembly (parliament) of Pakistan where UN Women assisted in crafting new legislation inspired by best practices from other predominantly Islamic countries where laws have already been passed to outlaw child marriages. If passed, the law will apply nationwide and will be a big win for the women and girls of Pakistan. At present, only the province of Sindh has passed a law where the minimum age of marriage for girls is 18.

Effie: What was the biggest learning(s) you took away from this effort?

AR: We realised that in order to have an effective and memorable impact on the audience, we must deliver our message to them when they are least expecting it, and do it in a way in which the intrusion is welcomed. In order to connect with people on an emotional and authentic level, we not only had to create something highly meaningful that didn’t sound like adspeak, but also had to be strategically accurate. We used the power of fashion design and, by integrating a highly local insight that utilised traditional craft, managed to connect on a very relevant level with an unexpected execution.

Jamshed M. Kazi is the former UN Women Country Representative to Pakistan. He is currently the Country Representative to ASEAN UN Women in Indonesia.

Ali Rez is the Regional Executive Creative Director for Middle East and Pakistan at BBDO. He has been named South Asia Creative of the Year by Campaign Magazine.

Read the full “The Bridal Uniform” case on the Effie Case Database >