World Obesity Day 2023: Key outcomes and impact

On 4 March 2023, people and communities around the world marked World Obesity Day. This year’s theme ‘Changing Perspectives: Let’s Talk About Obesity’ built on the success of previous years while also exploring a new direction.

The World Obesity Day 2023 campaign aimed to encourage constructive conversations about obesity that could help key audiences challenge stigmas, taboos and misconceptions, share ideas, and work together to find cross-cutting solutions.

We developed the campaign with input and feedback from a range of stakeholders to ensure a variety of voices. These included World Obesity staff alongside creative agency Shape History, with regular input from a Global Advisory Group of expert regional representatives. This year we also consulted stakeholders via surveys, focus groups and informal conversations. Our theme and narrative moved away from the 'everybody' themes of 2021 and 2022 to focus on systemic issues, stigma and the importance of talking about obesity.

We developed a wide range of new assets including conversation cards to make talking about obesity easier for everyone. These were designed to be useable beyond World Obesity Day and are available on the WOD website. Members and trusted collaborators were given exclusive access to editable versions of some of the assets in order to adapt them for their country, language and other circumstances. Overall, there were 19,000 downloads of our WOD 2023 assets!

Campaign Highlights

We reviewed this year’s campaign development process and outcomes, as well as celebrated some of the successes around the world. Here are some of the highlights:

• 54,680,935,184 global press reach as at end March 2023 (compared to 1.9 billion in 2022)

• 440,221,567 Twitter impressions across the hashtags and over 2.6m direct impressions i.e. solely World Obesity channels (+58% on 2022)

• 23,648,359,200 one-day press reach on the day of publication (3 March 2023)

• 70% acquisition to website via organic search compared to over 60% via paid ads in 2022, demonstrating strong organic reach

• 124% increase in Global Obesity Observatory users in March and a 111% increase in page views (from 62k in 2022 to >130k in 2023)

• 19,000 total downloads of campaign resources across 9,000 users

• Strong global reach with website visits from 180 countries. Top visitor numbers were from: USA, India, Mexico, UK, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Italy, Netherland, Malaysia

• 150+ stories and events across ~40 countries added to the World Obesity Day website

• 175 attendees at high-level global policy event featuring the Director-General of the World Health Organization

• 100+ European media stories online, in the press, on radio and TV

• 8.5m impressions of #IntercambiandoPerspectivas 

• 20,000 delegates at landmark Chinese virtual summit and 400,000+ Chinese school students engaged in WOD

Key Learnings:

Some of the key learnings from 2023 to consider in our planning for 2024 include:

• Translations: As a global campaign, World Obesity Day needs to be accessible in many languages. Finding a translatable theme and enabling easy translation of campaign assets are important.
• Actions: This year saw the development of longer-term calls to action as part of WOD’s goals. These should be reinforced throughout the year so there is continuity and momentum between campaigns.
• Assets: Access to a range of assets is important to supporters and participants. New and existing assets should be developed or updated in collaboration with people with lived experience to ensure they are inclusive.
• Collaboration: This year’s focus groups and interactive WOD workshop event helped collaborators connect and share ideas. Integrating more opportunities into the campaign development process will help us realise our long-term call to action to expand local networks.

Looking ahead

World Obesity Day 2023 sought to change perspectives by encouraging more and better conversations around obesity – with the longer-term goals of helping countries to develop strong advocacy networks and push for national action plans.

We identified 3 ongoing calls to action:

1. Continue the conversation: This year we created a set of conversation cards to make talking about obesity easier for everyone. They are available as education and event tools all year round.
2. Build new networks: We encourage people to reach out to other local groups dealing with cross-cutting issues. By engaging and collaborating with others, we can learn about useful regional approaches, share experiences and learnings around advocacy, funding, prevention, care, and more, and help create effective national strategies.
3. Push for national action plans: Finally, we encourage advocates to push for accelerated action and investment in national strategies, and the integration of obesity into broader health agendas. Supporters can use the Atlas Report 2023 and Global Obesity Observatory data to support their arguments.

Our strategic approach for 2024 is to focus on empowering members and collaborators to activate their regional networks, and to maximise the campaign’s meaningful reach and impact, as we aim to elevate WOD to even greater heights in 2024!