Love Has No Labels — Love Rises

Bias and discrimination are some of the most pressing issues facing our nation today. And while many people care about inclusion and want to do something, they don’t know how to take action.

Since 2015, the Ad Council’s Love Has No Labels campaign has flooded culture with diverse images of love and acceptance in order to combat bias and promote inclusion across race, age, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and ability. The campaign needed to inspire action and drive consumers to lovehasnolabels.com, where they could learn more about everyday acts of inclusion. So Courageous took on the challenge, in partnership with Facebook Creative Shop, and developed a compelling two-part series designed to inspire action.

The work tapped into a key insight uncovered through Love Has No Labels’ qualitative research, which found that disasters are a key moment when people come together across identity labels and set aside their biases. These moments of togetherness show that we all have an inherent desire for inclusion and connection, but bias and social norms prevent us from acting this way day every day.

Our team tackled tough subject matter and asked, ‘Why Does It Take a Disaster to Bring Us Together?’ Featuring award-winning storyteller and influencer Jay Shetty, we explored what we can all learn from unlikely friendships that were developed in the aftermath of disaster and tragedy.

In Love Rises in Orlando, two reverends — one straight and one gay connected in the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub shooting to reconsider their biases. And in Love Rises in Houston, we saw how a Jewish and a Muslim woman came together in the wake of Hurricane Harvey to rebuild their community.

The films were optimized for mobile and launched via a digital and social omni-channel distribution strategy, seeding content across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Great Big Story, CNN, Apple News and countless additional content platforms. Host Jay Shetty leveraged his 40 million plus social followers on his channels, too.

With Facebook as our partner, we took advantage of the opportunity for a sophisticated dynamic launch where we tested sixteen variations of each film in real time, focusing on optimizing the first 5 and 15 seconds, and tweaked the campaign to maximize audience engagement and film completion while exploring hypothesis about how to craft digital messaging.

While the films were incredibly well received, they also enjoyed some of the highest completion scores in Facebook Creative’s database, with the final “hero” versions receiving an unheard of 93% completion rate if viewers made it through the first 7 seconds. We were also able to capture valuable insights about what motivated viewers to keep watching. These learnings impacted not only my own future creative strategies but changed the way many of our partners tell short form video stories as well.