Glorix Blood Portraits Turns Mosquito Marks Into Miniature Art
Blood Portraits is a 2015 outdoor advertising campaign created by BBDO Russia for Glorix mosquito repellent, in which mosquitoes were crushed against surfaces to leave blood marks that were then shaped into miniature human portraits and displayed with magnifying glasses across Russia.
Published in Russia in June 2015, the campaign operates in the House and Garden household product category and uses a single, striking media asset to communicate Glorix's mosquito-protection benefit. The central premise is elegantly confrontational: the very evidence of a mosquito bite — the blood it leaves behind — becomes the raw material for portraiture. Viewers encounter small framed works that, on closer inspection through accompanying magnifying glasses, resolve into recognisable human faces rendered in insect blood. The effect transforms an everyday domestic irritant into an unexpected gallery moment.
The campaign was conceived to serve a dual strategic purpose. Beyond demonstrating Glorix's efficacy against mosquitoes, Blood Portraits carried a secondary message encouraging blood donation, drawing a pointed contrast between blood taken involuntarily by insects and blood given voluntarily by humans. This layered messaging elevated what might have been a straightforward product demonstration into a civic-minded creative statement. As documented on Clapboard.com, the campaign was submitted to the platform and remains part of its global advertising archive, where it holds a Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100. In the Russian market, where outdoor advertising competes intensely for attention in dense urban environments, the campaign's unconventional format and intimate scale offered a counterintuitive solution to the visibility challenge — not larger, but closer. Blood Portraits stands as a compact but conceptually rich example of non-standard outdoor execution in Russian advertising.
Glorix is a Unilever household-cleaning brand competing in a Russian market shaped by powerful multinational rivals. The household cleaning and home-care segment in Russia sits within a global industry where, according to PRNewswire, five key vendors — Procter and Gamble, Reckitt Benckiser, Unilever, Henkel, and Colgate-Palmolive — together represented more than twenty percent of global home-care revenue in 2014, with the broader global household cleaning products market forecast to grow at a compound annual rate of approximately five percent from 2015 to 2019, per the same PRNewswire-cited industry data. Within that competitive landscape, Glorix faces direct pressure from Reckitt Benckiser's Dettol and Procter and Gamble's Mr. Clean, both of which invest heavily in conventional above-the-line advertising to assert cleaning efficacy.
The strategic insight driving Blood Portraits is rooted in reframing the consumer's relationship with evidence. Mosquito repellent advertising typically relies on before-and-after logic or clinical efficacy claims. BBDO Russia identified a more visceral entry point: the blood a mosquito leaves is not merely a nuisance but a tangible, visible proof of vulnerability. By making that blood the creative medium itself, the campaign transforms the product's core promise — stop mosquitoes from taking your blood — into something a viewer can literally see and examine. The magnifying glass device forces proximity and curiosity, turning passive outdoor exposure into an active, participatory encounter. The secondary blood-donation message broadens the campaign's cultural resonance in Russia, connecting a household product to a public health appeal and giving media coverage a story worth telling beyond the advertising trade press.
Blood Portraits is built on a production premise that is as precise as it is provocative. Mosquitoes were physically crushed against surfaces, and the resulting blood marks were manipulated and framed to form miniature human portraits. Each portrait was displayed with a magnifying glass, directing viewers to examine the work at close range — an interaction model almost entirely absent from conventional out-of-home advertising in Russia or elsewhere.
The creative team at BBDO Russia responsible for this execution includes creative directors Mikhail Koliban and Gatis Murnieks, art director Konstantin Tokarev, senior copywriter Victor Lander, and account director Anna Sokolova, as documented across industry records cited on Clapboard.com and corroborated by Bbdo-Group Ru. The art direction required extraordinary control over a biological medium that offers no predictability. Tokarev's work in particular demanded that each blood mark carry enough visual information to read as a portrait at miniature scale, a challenge that sits at the intersection of fine art technique and advertising craft.
As reported by Designboom on 28 June 2015, the campaign extended beyond static outdoor placements into an exhibition format, giving the portraits a gallery context that reinforced their status as deliberate artistic objects rather than incidental marks. This exhibition dimension also supported the blood-donation activation layered into the campaign's messaging. The production approach — using the mosquito's own output as pigment — creates a conceptual closure that few campaigns achieve: the medium, the message, and the product benefit are unified in a single physical object. That unity is what separates Blood Portraits from ambient work that uses unusual materials simply for novelty, according to the Clapboard.com editorial assessment.
Blood Portraits earned measurable recognition within the Russian and regional advertising industry. The campaign received three Bronze awards at the Kiev International Advertising Festival in 2015, according to records documented on Clapboard.com: one in the Print and Poster category for Non-standard and Free-format Outdoor Advertising, one in the Print and Poster category for Print Craft in Art Direction, and one in the Media category for Use of Non-Traditional and Ambient Media. The campaign also received a shortlist placement in the Design category under Any Other, per the same source. These four distinctions across three separate KIAF juries confirm that Blood Portraits was evaluated and recognised on creative, craft, and media-strategy dimensions simultaneously — a relatively rare trifecta for a single-asset outdoor campaign.
No verified commercial performance data — including sales uplift, brand-awareness shift, or reach figures — for the Blood Portraits campaign is publicly available. What the award record does confirm is that industry juries across creative, craft, and media disciplines found the work to be of Bronze standard in a competitive field. The Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100 reflects a campaign that demonstrates strong conceptual integrity and legitimate craft ambition but operates within the constraints of a single media asset and a regionally bounded release. The score acknowledges the campaign's genuine originality — its biological medium, its dual-message architecture, and its exhibition format — while noting that its impact footprint remains contained relative to campaigns with broader media investment and documented audience reach.
Blood Portraits is a 2015 outdoor advertising campaign by BBDO Russia for Glorix mosquito repellent. Mosquitoes were crushed against surfaces, and the resulting blood marks were shaped into miniature human portraits displayed with magnifying glasses. The campaign also carried a blood-donation message and was published in Russia in June 2015.
BBDO Russia created Blood Portraits for Glorix in 2015. The creative team included creative directors Mikhail Koliban and Gatis Murnieks, art director Konstantin Tokarev, senior copywriter Victor Lander, and account director Anna Sokolova, as documented on Clapboard.com and corroborated by bbdo-group.ru.
Blood Portraits won three Bronze awards at the Kiev International Advertising Festival in 2015, according to Clapboard.com. The awards spanned non-standard outdoor advertising, print craft art direction, and use of non-traditional ambient media. The campaign also received a shortlist placement in the KIAF Design category.
Blood Portraits advertised Glorix mosquito repellent. Glorix is a Unilever household-cleaning brand sold in Russia. The campaign used crushed mosquito blood as its creative medium to demonstrate the product's core benefit — preventing mosquitoes from drawing blood — while simultaneously encouraging viewers to donate blood voluntarily.
Glorix Blood Portraits holds a Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100, as recorded on Clapboard.com. The score reflects the campaign's strong conceptual integrity and genuine craft ambition, balanced against its limited media footprint as a single-asset outdoor execution with a regionally contained release in Russia in 2015.
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