Canadian National Film Board's 'Draw Me A Penis' campaign, created by Rethink in March 2019, used cultural contrast and a mobile game to challenge myths about
ARCHIVEHow Rethink and the NFB Turned a Provocative Prompt Into Public Education
Draw Me A Penis is a 2019 NSFW public interest campaign created by Canadian agency Rethink for the National Film Board of Canada, launched in Canada on March 4, 2019, ahead of International Women's Day, designed to challenge widespread myths about female sexual pleasure by contrasting cultural familiarity with penis drawings against near-universal ignorance of the clitoris.
The campaign promotes Clit-me, a five-minute interactive mobile game developed in partnership with Université du Québec à Montréal, known as UQAM. Eight UQAM participants drawn from journalism, interactive media, and graphic design programs contributed to the project through the NFB Digital Studio's Jeunes pousses interactive-school program. This institutional collaboration gave the campaign an educational foundation that distinguished it clearly from commercial provocation, anchoring the NSFW creative device in a credible public interest mandate.
The central creative logic is disarmingly simple. Most people can sketch a penis from memory. Far fewer can accurately identify or describe the clitoris. Draw Me A Penis exploits that asymmetry directly, using the familiarity and cultural ubiquity of penis graffiti as an entry point to redirect attention toward a body part that remains poorly understood despite its significance to female sexual health. In Canada, where the NFB has operated as a public cultural institution since 1939, the campaign fits squarely within the board's long-standing mission to use media to serve the public interest.
The campaign consists of a single film asset and the Clit-me interactive experience, making it a tightly scoped execution rather than a broad media campaign. It was submitted to the creative industry record approximately six years ago, per Clapboard editorial records. The Clapboard Score for this campaign stands at 79 out of 100, reflecting strong conceptual clarity and cultural relevance within its category.
Rethink built the campaign's strategy on a single, verifiable cultural observation. The penis is arguably the most drawn informal symbol in public spaces globally, appearing on school desks, bathroom walls, and digital messages with remarkable consistency across demographics. The clitoris, by contrast, is absent from that cultural vocabulary despite being central to female sexual experience. That gap is not accidental. It reflects decades of underfunded sexual health education and media representation that has historically centred male anatomy.
In Canada, the NFB occupies a distinct position among media institutions. It operates as a public producer and distributor funded through the federal government, per Canada Ca, which gives it a mandate to address topics that commercial broadcasters may avoid. That mandate creates strategic permission for a campaign like Draw Me A Penis that a private media brand could not credibly produce without appearing exploitative. The NFB's institutional credibility transforms the NSFW framing from shock tactic into legitimate public health communication.
Rethink, one of Canada's most awarded independent agencies and a consistent presence at international creative competitions, has a documented history of using cultural tension as a strategic lever. The agency's choice to pair a deliberately provocative title with a genuinely educational interactive experience reflects a strategic discipline: the headline earns attention, but the Clit-me mobile game delivers substance. Competitors in the Canadian public interest media space, including Telefilm Canada and provincial health authorities, have generally pursued more conservative creative approaches to sexual health topics, which made the NFB's willingness to embrace an NSFW register a meaningful differentiator in the market. According to Thinktv Ca, Canadian television and digital video audiences continue to engage most strongly with content that combines emotional provocation with informational payoff, a dynamic this campaign was structured to exploit.
The campaign's creative execution centres on a single film asset that gives visual and rhetorical form to the strategic insight. The film deploys the contrast at the heart of the campaign with directness: it shows how readily people draw a penis and how completely they fail to reproduce the clitoris with equivalent accuracy or confidence. The tone is neither clinical nor comedic in a dismissive sense. It treats the gap in knowledge as culturally absurd rather than shameful, which lowers the barrier for audiences who might otherwise disengage from sexual health content.
The Clit-me mobile game, developed through the NFB Digital Studio's Jeunes pousses program with eight UQAM students across journalism, interactive media, and graphic design, represents the campaign's most substantial creative investment. A five-minute interactive experience is a significant ask of a casual digital audience, and the decision to build the experience at that length suggests the creative team prioritised depth of understanding over broad reach. The interdisciplinary student team brought together visual, journalistic, and technical skills, which is consistent with the NFB Digital Studio's approach to nurturing emerging Canadian talent in interactive media, as documented in the studio's public program descriptions.
Production credits for the Draw Me A Penis campaign are not publicly documented beyond the agency attribution to Rethink and the confirmed involvement of the UQAM student cohort through the Jeunes pousses program. The campaign launched on March 4, 2019, four days before International Women's Day on March 8, a timing decision that amplified the cultural context without requiring additional media spend to establish relevance. As reported by adsoftheworld.com, the campaign was archived as a film medium execution, with the interactive Clit-me experience serving as its primary functional deliverable. The restraint of the single-asset approach keeps the creative idea undiluted and forces the film to carry the full argumentative weight of the campaign.
ARCHIVENo verified performance data for the Draw Me A Penis campaign is publicly available. No published figures for film viewership, Clit-me game completions, website traffic, earned media reach, awareness lift, or conversion metrics have been identified across industry sources including warc.com, marketingdive.com, or Telefilm Ca. No awards have been confirmed across Cannes Lions, Effies, The One Show, D&AD, Clios, Webby Awards, or WARC Awards, per Clapboard editorial research.
Structural analysis of the campaign's effectiveness potential is, however, strong. The campaign operates in a category where earned media and social sharing typically generate the primary distribution. An NSFW title with genuine educational purpose creates exactly the kind of shareable tension that drives organic amplification in Canadian digital media environments. According to Dmn Ca, provocative public interest content in Canada consistently outperforms conventionally framed health communication in terms of unprompted social sharing, which suggests the campaign's architecture was well suited to the media landscape it entered.
The International Women's Day timing gave the campaign access to a predictable surge of editorial and social attention at no additional cost. The NFB's institutional standing in Canada, recognised through its federal mandate documented at canada.ca, lent the work a credibility that protects it from the criticism that purely commercial NSFW campaigns routinely attract. As reported by Newswire Ca, NFB interactive projects produced through the Jeunes pousses program have historically found audiences through educational and institutional channels as well as public digital platforms, extending effective reach beyond initial campaign visibility. The Clapboard Score of 79 out of 100 reflects the campaign's strong conceptual foundation and strategic timing against the absence of verified impact data.
Draw Me A Penis is a 2019 NSFW public interest campaign created by Rethink for the National Film Board of Canada. It launched on March 4, 2019, ahead of International Women's Day, promoting Clit-me, an interactive mobile game designed to challenge myths about female sexual pleasure and improve understanding of the clitoris.
Canadian agency Rethink created the Draw Me A Penis campaign for the National Film Board of Canada. The Clit-me interactive game at the campaign's core was developed through the NFB Digital Studio's Jeunes pousses program with eight students from Université du Québec à Montréal across journalism, interactive media, and graphic design disciplines.
The NFB used the NSFW title to exploit a cultural asymmetry. Most people can draw a penis from memory but cannot accurately identify the clitoris. The provocative framing earns attention and makes the educational gap legible, while the NFB's federal public mandate provides institutional credibility that protects the work from appearing exploitative.
Clit-me is a five-minute interactive mobile game developed with UQAM through the NFB Digital Studio's Jeunes pousses program. It is the primary educational deliverable of the Draw Me A Penis campaign, designed to address myths about female sexual pleasure and improve public understanding of the clitoris in the Canadian market.
No verified awards for Draw Me A Penis have been confirmed. Clapboard editorial research found no recognised wins across Cannes Lions, Effies, The One Show, D&AD, Clios, Webby Awards, or WARC Awards. The campaign holds a Clapboard Score of 79 out of 100, reflecting strong conceptual clarity within its public interest category.
Rethink launched Draw Me A Penis on March 4, 2019, four days before International Women's Day on March 8. The timing gave the Canadian campaign immediate cultural relevance and access to elevated editorial and social media attention without requiring additional media investment to establish its seasonal context.
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