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Vaincre Noma Puts a Real Face on a Hidden Disease
Vaincre Noma's "Give NOMA a face" is a 2018 digital public interest campaign created by Paris agency WNP that used a Snapchat augmented-reality lens to show users in France what their own face might look like affected by noma, forcing direct confrontation with a disease whose imagery is routinely blurred or censored for being too disturbing to publish.
Noma is a rapidly progressing gangrenous infection that destroys facial tissue, primarily affecting severely malnourished children. Because photographs of noma patients are almost universally considered too graphic for mainstream publication, public awareness of the disease remains exceptionally low even among populations with access to global health information. Vaincre Noma, the French association dedicated to fighting the disease, identified this censorship as the central barrier to visibility and commissioned WNP to design a campaign that could sidestep it entirely. Rather than showing documented images of real patients — images that platforms and publishers routinely suppress — the campaign invited users to generate the image themselves, on their own face, through a medium they already trusted for playful self-expression.
The campaign launched in France in October 2018, timed deliberately to coincide with Halloween. The seasonal context gave the creative strategy a precise rhetorical edge: at the moment when skeletons, vampires, and ghosts flood social feeds as harmless entertainment, "Give NOMA a face" asked users to confront a real disfigurement that resembles those fictional horrors but carries none of their safety. The Snapcode activating the lens was distributed across Facebook, Twitter, and the Vaincre Noma website, broadening reach beyond Snapchat's native audience. The campaign exists as a single digital media asset, and its Clapboard Score is 71 out of 100.
WNP identified a structural contradiction at the heart of noma awareness. The disease's visibility problem is self-reinforcing: because its effects are visually extreme, images are censored; because images are censored, public knowledge stays minimal; because public knowledge stays minimal, fundraising and political pressure remain insufficient. The agency's strategic answer was to relocate the visual shock from documentary photography — which platforms remove — to user-generated augmented reality, which platforms actively support.
The timing in October 2018 was not incidental. Halloween represents one of the most concentrated moments of voluntary facial transformation in contemporary culture, when users enthusiastically apply filters depicting skeletons, vampires, and ghosts for social sharing. According to adsoftheworld.com, the campaign was designed to contrast Snapchat's temporary, playful facial transformations with noma's permanent physical damage. That contrast is the campaign's entire argument: the fictional horror users choose at Halloween is aesthetically similar to the real destruction noma causes, but one disappears when the app closes and the other does not.
The competitive context for public interest digital campaigns in France in 2018 was dominated by organisations leveraging social platforms for emotional engagement. Médecins Sans Frontières and UNICEF France both maintained active digital presences using documentary imagery and video storytelling, approaches that depend on platform tolerance for graphic content. WNP's solution for Vaincre Noma was structurally different: it used the platform's own promotional technology — the Snapchat lens — as the medium of communication, making the campaign formally inseparable from the experience of using Snapchat itself. According to fondationpierrefabre.org, noma is classified by the World Health Organization as a neglected disease, a designation that underscores the chronic gap between clinical urgency and public recognition that this campaign was designed to address.
Creative direction on "Give NOMA a face" was led by Delphine Tabutin and Marion Thiéry at WNP. Art direction was handled by Isabelle Bouffier, with copywriting by Guillaume Clarke. The three-dimensional facial transformation work was executed by NKI Studio, the specialist 3D partner brought in to build the lens itself, while sound was provided by THE.
The lens design required a form of craft that is distinct from conventional advertising production. NKI Studio's task was not to illustrate noma abstractly but to simulate its specific physiological effects — the destruction of soft tissue around the mouth, jaw, and cheeks — in a way that would read as credible when mapped onto a live moving face via Snapchat's real-time face-tracking technology. The realism threshold mattered enormously: too stylised and the transformation would register as Halloween costume rather than medical reality; too graphic and the content would trigger the same platform suppression applied to documentary photographs. According to adsoftheworld.com, the lens was developed collaboratively by WNP, Snapchat, and NKI Studio, meaning the platform itself was a creative partner in the execution, not merely a distribution channel.
The activation mechanism was equally considered. Users did not encounter the lens passively through an algorithmic feed. They accessed it by scanning a Snapcode — a deliberate, volitional act — distributed via Facebook, Twitter, and the Vaincre Noma website. That extra step made the experience opt-in by design, which is both an ethical choice and a strategic one: users who actively seek the transformation are more likely to sit with what they see. The sound layer provided by THE added temporal weight to what would otherwise be a purely visual moment, giving the experience a duration that a static image cannot enforce. Marion Thiéry's prior creative involvement in the 2016 Vaincre Noma campaign for the same client through WNP, documented on adsoftheworld.com, indicates a sustained creative relationship with the subject matter rather than a single-brief engagement.
No independently verified performance metrics for "Give NOMA a face" — including lens activations, reach figures, or donation uplift — are publicly available through Cannes Lions, the Effies, or other named award and reporting bodies as of the time of writing. Searches across gegen-noma.de, adsoftheworld.com, linkedin.com, iampatrickweir.com, leparisien.fr, and jurishop.fr return no confirmed figures attributable to this campaign. The absence of published results is itself consistent with the broader pattern of under-documentation that surrounds noma as a subject: a disease that struggles for media visibility also tends to generate campaigns whose downstream data is not systematically reported.
What structural analysis can establish is that the campaign's mechanics were designed to maximise earned amplification on a platform built for content sharing. A Snapchat lens that produces a confronting self-image creates a natural social tension: users must decide whether to share what they see, and that decision moment is itself a form of engagement with the campaign's message. The Halloween launch window in France amplified this dynamic by providing a culturally normalised reason to share facial transformation content, lowering the psychological barrier to distribution.
The campaign's Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100 reflects strong conceptual coherence and platform-native creative thinking, moderated by the limited scale of a single digital asset and the absence of verifiable outcome data. The decision to involve Snapchat as a development partner rather than simply a paid placement channel represents a meaningful structural innovation for a public interest campaign in France in 2018, at a moment when most comparable organisations were still treating social platforms primarily as media-buying environments.
Give NOMA a face was a 2018 digital public interest campaign in France created by WNP for Vaincre Noma. It used a Snapchat augmented-reality lens, developed with NKI Studio, to show users what their own face might look like affected by noma, making a censored disease directly visible through self-image.
WNP timed the campaign to October 2018 to contrast Halloween's fictional imagery of skeletons, vampires, and ghosts with noma's real facial destruction. According to adsoftheworld.com, the strategy deliberately used a cultural moment of playful facial transformation to expose the permanence of actual noma damage.
Creative directors Delphine Tabutin and Marion Thiéry led the campaign at WNP, with art direction by Isabelle Bouffier and copywriting by Guillaume Clarke. Three-dimensional facial simulation was built by NKI Studio, and sound was produced by THE, with Snapchat serving as a collaborative technology partner throughout development.
Vaincre Noma chose Snapchat because documentary photographs of noma are routinely censored by platforms for being too graphic. A Snapchat lens sidesteps that suppression by generating the image on the user's own face, making the disease's effects visible through the platform's own supported technology rather than imported documentary content.
Noma is a rapidly progressing gangrenous infection destroying facial tissue, classified by the World Health Organization as a neglected disease according to fondationpierrefabre.org. Its extreme visual impact causes its imagery to be routinely censored, creating a self-reinforcing awareness gap that Vaincre Noma and WNP designed the 2018 campaign specifically to interrupt.
No awards for Give NOMA a face have been documented across Cannes Lions, the Effies, or other major bodies. Searches of gegen-noma.de, adsoftheworld.com, and linkedin.com return no confirmed recognition. The campaign's Clapboard Score is 71 out of 100, reflecting strong conceptual clarity and platform-native execution.
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