Body Week
I founded and led BuzzFeed’s annual Body Week, a cross-team effort devoted to exploring and celebrating bodies and our often complicated relationships with them. The week covered topics such as illness and disability, fitness, body dysmorphia and eating disorders, self-expression through physical means, and media representations of and misconceptions about bodies.

It’s been reproduced annually since 2016.

BuzzFeed Body Week

My role:

• Conducted editorial-wide brainstorming around Body Week topics, working with both entertainment and news divisions.

• Oversaw all planning and worked with editors to vet and assign pieces.

• Connected with marketing to explore potential content sponsorship opportunities.

• Worked with design and product to create branding and build out landing pages for content.

• Coordinated the rollout of content over 7 days.

• Performed a content postmortem, looking at high- and low-performing pieces, and made recommendations for future theme weeks.

• Developed a project checklist template to streamline the production of future theme weeks.

Results:

•BuzzFeed editorial produced more than 100 pieces of content for the week.

• The content series generated more than 50 million pageviews and became an annual content package.

• Body Week served to help brand the unique perspective of BuzzFeed’s beauty and style verticals.

I went on to run additional theme week packages, including Mental Health Week, which was recognized by the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

A paper on Mental Health Week was also published by the National Institutes of Health.

Learnings:

Audiences crave work that feels authentic and relatable. Typically websites serve up “body positivity” as a one-size-fits-all answer to anxiety around appearance, but our audience appreciated that we took a more complex and multi-faceted look at how we deal with our physical forms.

Project: Vibe Check Series

Branding and Editorial Strategy: As/Is