Praise for JWT's elegant, beautiful and sensitive 'I Touch Myself Project'

Praise for JWT's elegant, beautiful and sensitive 'I Touch Myself Project'
B&T Magazine
By B&T Magazine



The Cancer Council’s new ‘I Touch Myself Project’ by JWT Sydney has been given the thumbs up by creatives as the tender re-purposing of Chrissy Amphlett’s ‘I Touch Myself’ song strikes a chord.

The campaign launched on April 14 with a black-and-white music video featuring numerous Australian female singers turning the Divinyl’s biggest hit into a breast cancer awareness anthem.

Neil Mallet, the ECD of independent creative agency Marmalade, described the  work as beautiful and elegant.

“Having witnessed first hand the complex, distressing and often brutal nature of breast cancer, I can only say I praise anyone who gave their time to the realisation of this project,” Mallet told B&T.

“It is a selfless endeavour for something that touches so many families.”

He said the music video gave him goose bumps, a measurement of its potency.

“To so elegantly re-imagine, or repurpose, a song that is fundamentally about female masturbation to self examination, takes great craft,” Mallet said.

“The fact that Chrissy Amphlett’s wishes were realised so beautifully is a credit to all involved for their perseverance and commitment to the task.”

Amphlett passed away in April last after battling breast cancer and multiple sclerosis. It was her wish that the song was turned into an anthem for breast cancer awareness. For more details on the campaign click here.

JWT’s executive creative director Simon Langley said earlier this week that he hopes the campaign “will become a media and social media phenomena”.

James Noble, UX and managing director of Melbourne’s Carter Digital, believes #Itouchmyself has the perfect ingredients for social media success: a strong emotional hook, simplicity, a positive core message and reach across multiple social platforms.

“It is getting harder and harder to engage people with a social media campaign as they are being bombarded with these on a regular basis,” Noble said.

“This one has a simple message, it’s own posthumous ambassador and a killer readymade jingle.”

However, he said photo and video submissions – which is required for #itouchmyselfie – are getting harder to pull off.

“Despite the success of the ‘without makeup’ selfie campaign, people are being asked to submit something rather more intimate and personal,” he said of this element of the campaign which asks people to share their own version of the song and pictures showing women touch their breasts.

“It will certainly have more traction on Twitter because people can participate easily just by hitting the auto-tweet button.”

Mallet believes it has social momentum: “The subject matter, the sensitive treatment and the elegance of the women involved all provide ample reasons for it to be successful.”

Fairfax Radio Network’s 3AW is one media company that has already thrown its support behind the #itouchmyselfie with a picture (below) showing women from the office responding to the message.




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