How UNAIDS and FCB India Used a Hidden Box to Make Transgender Children Visible
Unbox Me is a 2022 public service film campaign by UNAIDS and FCB India that uses the universal childhood ritual of hiding treasured objects as a metaphor for the concealed gender identities of transgender children in India, launching on 30 March 2022, one day before International Transgender Day of Visibility on 31 March.
The campaign arrives as part of the broader #SeeMeAsIAm platform, a year-long collaboration between UNAIDS and FCB India that seeks to bring the lived realities of transgender people into mainstream public conversation. Unbox Me follows The Mirror, a 2021 film produced under the same partnership, which depicted a young boy dressing as a woman while looking in a mirror, raising awareness of gender identity formation in childhood. Unbox Me extends that creative lineage with a more intimate and symbolically layered device: the secret box.
In India, it is common for children to keep a small box in which they store their most prized possessions — drawings, photographs, small objects that represent who they are and what they dream of becoming. For many transgender children, according to UNAIDS, this act of hiding objects becomes something more fraught: a way of concealing their true identity from family members, peers, and a society that may not yet accept them. The campaign aims to unbox those secrets symbolically, opening a conversation not only for transgender children in India but, in the words of the campaign brief, everywhere. The film medium was chosen as the primary asset, with a single film asset distributed across social platforms timed precisely to the International Transgender Day of Visibility on 31 March 2022. The Clapboard Score for Unbox Me is 74 out of 100, reflecting strong creative concept and cultural resonance within the public service category.
UNAIDS grounds its communications strategy in the relationship between social discrimination and HIV vulnerability among transgender populations. The strategic insight behind Unbox Me is direct: transgender children who are forced to hide their identities face compounding risks across their lifetimes, and visibility at an early age is a protective factor. FCB India chose to locate that insight in the earliest possible moment of identity formation, with research cited by UNAIDS indicating that some transgender children become aware of their gender non-conformity as early as the age of two.
The strategic framing of the campaign as a social experiment rather than a conventional public service announcement was deliberate. According to reporting by The Drum, FCB India used the concept of unboxing — a cultural phenomenon familiar across digital platforms — and inverted it, transforming an act of consumer revelation into an act of personal liberation. This repositioning gave the campaign a relevance among younger, digitally engaged audiences in India without sacrificing the gravity of the subject matter.
In India, the legal landscape for transgender people shifted significantly following the Supreme Court's NALSA judgment of 2014, which recognised a third gender, and the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act of 2019. Yet social acceptance, particularly for transgender children within family environments, continues to lag behind legal progress, according to reporting by News Un. This gap between legal recognition and lived reality forms the precise territory that Unbox Me occupies strategically. Competitors in the public service communications space, including campaigns from UNICEF India and The Humsafar Trust, have addressed LGBTQ+ visibility, but few have centred the experience of transgender children specifically within the metaphorical language of everyday Indian childhood. That specificity is FCB India's core strategic contribution to the #SeeMeAsIAm platform.
Swati Bhattacharya, Creative Chairperson of FCB India, conceptualised Unbox Me. Her creative rationale, as reported by news.un.org, begins with a precise cultural observation: in India, children commonly maintain a personal box in which they keep their most precious possessions hidden from adult scrutiny. Bhattacharya identified that for transgender children, this ordinary act of childhood secrecy takes on an entirely different weight, becoming the primary mechanism by which a child hides not just objects but their own sense of self.
The film execution builds on this metaphor with restraint. Rather than dramatising conflict or depicting overt discrimination, the creative approach allows the contents of the box — and the child associated with it — to carry the emotional argument. According to The Drum, the campaign was framed around the language of unboxing culture, a format native to the digital environments where its target audience spends time, and subverted that format to reveal something intimate and socially urgent rather than commercially aspirational.
FCB Chicago was also identified in the campaign's production network alongside FCB India, as documented by thedrum.com and shots.net, reflecting the global agency infrastructure that supported the project. UNAIDS communications lead Mahesh Mahalingam, Director of Communications and Global Advocacy, described the film and the broader project as a first of its kind, according to reporting by The Drum. That framing speaks to the absence of prior mainstream advertising creative that had placed transgender children's experience at its centre using the visual and narrative language of ordinary Indian childhood. The campaign's single film asset was built for social distribution, engineered for the compressed attention environment of platforms where International Transgender Day of Visibility generates concentrated conversation each year on 31 March.
Unbox Me earned three Cannes Lions Awards in 2022. According to UNAIDS, the campaign won two Bronze Lions in the Public Relations category and one Bronze Lion in the Social and Influencer category at Cannes Lions 2022. UNAIDS confirmed all three awards, representing the organisation's full Lions tally for that year. The campaign subsequently received three Spikes Asia Awards in 2023, according to UNAIDS, extending its recognised impact into the Asia-Pacific creative industry calendar.
No independently verified audience reach, view count, or engagement metrics for Unbox Me are publicly available at the time of writing. The campaign's structural effectiveness, however, is legible through its design choices. By launching on 30 March — precisely one day before International Transgender Day of Visibility — the campaign was positioned to benefit from the concentrated media and social attention that the 31 March date generates annually. The single-film format reduces production diffusion and concentrates message delivery. The social experiment framing, noted by The Drum as central to the campaign's identity, increases shareability by offering audiences a revelatory rather than purely didactic experience.
Mahesh Mahalingam of UNAIDS described Unbox Me as a first of its kind, a claim supported by the absence of precedent creative work centring transgender children through the specific metaphorical vocabulary of Indian childhood ritual. The Clapboard Score of 74 out of 100 reflects genuine creative distinction within the public service category, tempered by the limited diversity of media assets and the absence of measurable downstream behavioural data in the public record.
Unbox Me is a 2022 public service film campaign by UNAIDS and FCB India. Launched on 30 March 2022 ahead of International Transgender Day of Visibility, it uses the metaphor of a child's hidden treasure box to represent how transgender children conceal their gender identity. The campaign is part of the #SeeMeAsIAm platform.
FCB India created Unbox Me for UNAIDS. Swati Bhattacharya, Creative Chairperson of FCB India, conceptualised the campaign. FCB Chicago was also part of the agency network involved in production. UNAIDS communications lead Mahesh Mahalingam directed the client side of the project as Director of Communications and Global Advocacy.
Unbox Me won three Cannes Lions in 2022. According to UNAIDS, the campaign received two Bronze Lions in the Public Relations category and one Bronze Lion in the Social and Influencer category. It later received three Spikes Asia Awards in 2023, making it one of the more decorated public service campaigns from India that year.
#SeeMeAsIAm is a year-long UNAIDS and FCB India platform focused on transgender visibility and rights. Unbox Me is its 2022 centrepiece, following The Mirror in 2021. Both films use the experiences of transgender children in India to challenge stigma and open public conversation around gender identity and social acceptance.
UNAIDS links social discrimination against transgender people to heightened HIV vulnerability across their lifetimes. In India, despite legal recognition following the 2019 Transgender Persons Act, social acceptance within families remains limited. The campaign targets the earliest stage of identity formation, with UNAIDS noting some transgender children become aware of gender non-conformity as young as age two.
Unbox Me uses a children's hidden treasure box as its central creative metaphor. FCB India's Swati Bhattacharya identified that in India, children commonly keep secret boxes of prized objects. For transgender children, this ritual becomes a means of hiding gender identity. The campaign inverts the popular digital format of unboxing to reveal personal truth rather than a consumer product.
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