It simply follows: As Americans get fatter, their clothes get tighter. So when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was looking for ideas to encourage people to lose weight, the image of large bodies and too-small clothes seemed a pretty good one to work with.
The idea came to Jonathan Granof, a New Yorker and a copywriter with McCann Erickson, which executed the campaign pro-bono for HHS and the Ad Council.
“I was folding my laundry at the neighborhood laundromat when I saw this tall man folding a toddler’s T-shirt,” recalls Granof. "The sheer sight of this big guy folding such a small shirt sparked something in my brain. From there, the mini T-shirt was born.”
Indeed.
And so began the campaign in laundromats across the city, from Hell's Kitchen to the Upper East Side, Upper West Side and Murray Hill.
Patrons pulling their clothes from the drier got an extra item of clothing, really an ad. It was a tiny T-shirt that read, “Shrink a few sizes."
The message, catching people totally off-guard, was hard to miss: Lose a few of those pounds you're dragging around.
The tiny T sent the recipient to visit SmallStep.com, HHS’s site with tips on eating healthy.
HHS’s obesity prevention campaign has been up and running since 2004, with the T-shirt stunt being its latest attempt to drive visitors to the web site. Right now the site draws about 125,000 unique visitors a month, and its online newsletter has 145,000 subscribers.
McCann Erickson says 50 T-shirts were scattered across around 10 Laundromats beginning at the end of December.
