Healthcare Marketing Impact Awards - 2023

Campaign: Lil Sugar - Master of Disguise
Agency/Firm: Area 23, an IPG Health Company
Client: Hip Hop Public Health

Hip Hop Public Health, a group that provides nutrition education for Black communities, launched a unique campaign to address the lack of access to healthy foods experienced by many Black consumers. Lil Sugar, created with IPG Health agency Area 23, is a seemingly adorable character with an insidious agenda to hide on packaged foods’ nutrition labels that many lack the language to evaluate.

Voiced by Run-DMC vocalist Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, Lil Sugar stars in Hip Hop Public Health’s campaign featuring an animated music video, a storybook and a mobile video game. The music video ran in movie theaters, targeted digital media, on taxicabs and at community events for students. The campaign won gold for Integrated Campaign of the Year among advocacy organizations in the Healthcare Marketing Impact Awards 2023.

The video shows Lil Sugar breaking the illusion of its cute appearance by rapping about sugar’s many forms and the harmful effects of consuming products that over-index on them. The character dunks a basketball into a sports beverage as dextrose, then cannonballs into a vat of cereal as corn syrup before performing a magic trick to expose the maltose in a granola bar.

Lil Sugar was endorsed by the New York City Board of Education and was incorporated in 2022’s Open National Field Day event that toured 28 countries and 47 U.S. states and reached 833,710 students. Hip Hop Public Health said there were more than 42,000 downloads of Lil Sugar content, and that schools reported the campaign engaged more than 4 million students.