Liga Contra el Cancer Puts Breast Cancer Awareness on Screen in Peru
'Boobs With a Purpose' is a 2018 public interest film campaign created by MullenLowe Group's Lima office, MullenLowe 511, for Peruvian cancer organisation Liga Contra el Cancer, in which eight recognisable public figures appear on screen to normalise breast self-examination and encourage timely clinical screening among women in Peru.
Published in October 2018, the campaign arrived during a period of heightened global attention to breast cancer awareness and deliberately used the visibility of public personalities to cut through the cultural hesitancy that surrounds frank discussions of breast health in Peru. The campaign's NSFW classification is not incidental — it reflects a deliberate creative decision to confront, rather than sidestep, the physical reality of the disease. By featuring breasts directly and without euphemism, the film argues that the same body part made taboo by media convention is the one most urgently in need of regular examination.
The eight public personalities who participated — Leslie Stewart, Fernanda Kanno, Ebelin Ortiz, Georgette Cárdenas, Gachi Rivero, Cecilia, and colleagues, as reported by Mercadonegro Pe and Fullcontact Pe — brought existing public trust and cultural familiarity to the message, functioning less as celebrity endorsers and more as credible social witnesses. In Peru, where Liga Contra el Cancer has sustained multi-year public education efforts, this kind of trust-transfer from known figures to an institutional health message carries demonstrable strategic weight. The campaign comprises a single film asset, archived on Clapboard.com, and sits within a longer lineage of Liga Contra el Cancer public interest work that includes the 2015 Effie Peru Silver-winning campaign 'Con un gesto ponte rosa', according to Clapboard's editorial records. 'Boobs With a Purpose' earns a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100, reflecting its creative directness and contextual relevance within the Peruvian public health communications landscape.
Liga Contra el Cancer operates in a Peruvian public health environment where cultural norms around the female body have historically limited the directness of breast cancer communications. The campaign's core strategic insight is that the greatest barrier to breast self-examination is not ignorance of the disease but discomfort with the body part at risk. By naming the campaign 'Boobs With a Purpose' and building the film around that explicit framing, MullenLowe 511 chose confrontation over comfort as its primary persuasion mechanism.
This approach places the campaign in clear contrast with more cautious institutional health communications that rely on pink-ribbon iconography and abstracted metaphor. Organisations such as the American Cancer Society and Peruvian government health entities have historically used softer visual language for breast cancer outreach, a strategic space that 'Boobs With a Purpose' deliberately vacates. The campaign's documentary-adjacent register — real women, direct address, minimal production artifice — positions it closer to social experiment than to conventional public service advertising, a distinction that matters for audience credibility in Peru's increasingly media-literate urban centres.
Liga Contra el Cancer's 2018 work also carried the parallel message 'Juntos contra el cáncer' ('Together against cancer'), per Clapboard's editorial records, framing cancer not as an individual burden but as a condition that reshapes entire social networks. This dual messaging strategy — intimate and bodily in 'Boobs With a Purpose', communal and relational in the broader 2018 programme — suggests a sophisticated segmentation of the organisation's communication objectives across a single calendar year in Peru. The campaign's October timing aligns with international breast cancer awareness month, maximising earned media potential during a period when media organisations and social platforms across Peru actively seek relevant content.
Lea Raggio served as Creative Director and Copywriter on 'Boobs With a Purpose', with Gustavo Zamora as Art Director and Antonio Ballester as additional Copywriter, per Clapboard's production records. The creative team at MullenLowe 511 in Lima built the film around a social experiment structure, placing real public figures in a direct, confessional register that strips away the visual distance typical of institutional health communications in Peru.
The film's single-asset format is itself a creative statement. Rather than distributing the message across multiple formats or platforms simultaneously, MullenLowe 511 concentrated its creative energy into one piece of film, a decision that forces the audience to engage with the work on its own terms rather than encountering it fragmentarily. Javier Martínez and Miguel Villanueva served as Graphic Designers, contributing to the visual architecture of the piece, while Hermes Palacio filled the role of Digital Director, shaping how the film would travel in Peru's online environment.
Ana Torres served as Agency Producer Director, with Hervye V. listed among the production contributors per Clapboard's records. César Benavides was Chief Executive Officer of MullenLowe 511 at the time of production, with Paco Torrico as General Director and Carolina Salazar as Account Director, supported by Roxana Cano as Account Supervisor. The production's deliberate NSFW classification — unusual for a public interest campaign in Peru — functions as both a creative choice and a distribution signal, marking the content as intended for adult audiences who can receive an unmediated message about breast health. The documentary aesthetic, combined with the cultural weight of recognisable Peruvian public figures, gives the film a quality of witnessed testimony rather than produced advertisement, which is precisely the register Liga Contra el Cancer needed to separate this campaign from its predecessors.
No verified performance data for 'Boobs With a Purpose' is publicly available. No published campaign-specific figures exist for reach, impressions, screening appointment uplift, donation response, or brand awareness movement in Peru, and no awards for this campaign have been confirmed at Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards, per Clapboard's editorial records.
Structural analysis, however, points to several factors that would support real-world effectiveness in the Peruvian market. The use of eight public personalities provides multiple points of audience identification — different women, different levels of celebrity, different social contexts — increasing the probability that any given viewer in Peru finds a credible proxy for her own relationship to breast health. The October 2018 publication date aligns the campaign with international breast cancer awareness month, a period during which media attention to the topic intensifies and audiences are demonstrably more receptive to health communications, as consistently observed across public health research contexts.
Liga Contra el Cancer's prior creative work in Peru demonstrates institutional competence in public interest advertising: the 2015 campaign 'Con un gesto ponte rosa' won Silver at Effie Peru in the Marketing Social category and Bronze at Festival del Caribe in Social Responsibility, according to Clapboard's editorial records. 'Boobs With a Purpose' inherits that institutional credibility while raising the creative risk level. The campaign's Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects this balance — a campaign that demonstrates clear strategic intent and creative courage in the Peruvian public health communications space, constrained by the absence of documented distribution scale and measurable outcome data.
'Boobs With a Purpose' is a 2018 public interest film created by MullenLowe 511 in Lima for Liga Contra el Cancer in Peru. The campaign features eight public figures to normalise breast self-examination and encourage timely screening, using a direct, NSFW approach to overcome cultural hesitancy around breast health discussion.
MullenLowe 511 created the campaign in Lima, Peru. The agency's team included Creative Director and Copywriter Lea Raggio, Art Director Gustavo Zamora, and General Director Paco Torrico, with César Benavides serving as Chief Executive Officer of the Lima office at the time of production in October 2018.
The campaign's NSFW classification reflects its deliberate choice to show breasts directly rather than use abstracted or euphemistic imagery. MullenLowe 511 argued that confronting the physical reality of the body part at risk was essential to overcoming the cultural discomfort that limits breast self-examination uptake among women in Peru.
No verified awards for 'Boobs With a Purpose' have been confirmed at Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards, per Clapboard's editorial records. Liga Contra el Cancer's earlier 2015 campaign 'Con un gesto ponte rosa' did win Silver at Effie Peru in the Marketing Social category.
'Boobs With a Purpose' receives a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's clear strategic intent and creative directness within Peru's public health communications landscape, balanced against the absence of documented distribution scale, measurable outcome data, and recognised industry award recognition for this specific 2018 film.
Liga Contra el Cancer has maintained multi-year public education efforts in Peru. The 2015 campaign 'Con un gesto ponte rosa' won Effie Peru Silver in Marketing Social, per Clapboard's records. 'Boobs With a Purpose' raised the creative risk level in 2018 by abandoning soft iconography in favour of direct, documentary-style film featuring Peruvian public figures.
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