Case Study | Artslab Creatives x Fems Sri Lanka | Effie Awards Sri Lanka 2025
How Artslab Creatives built Sri Lanka’s first AI campaign for social impact and won two Silver Effies for it.
In 2024, Artslab Creatives did something the industry said was risky: we took deepfake AI, a technology most Sri Lankans associated with deception and harm, and rebuilt it as a tool for empathy and social change. The campaign, “Forward and Fearless: From Deepfake to Bold Purpose,” was developed for Fems Sri Lanka in support of its HER Foundation’s work on menstrual health and period poverty.
At the Effie Awards Sri Lanka 2025, competing against more than 300 entries from the country’s most established agencies, the campaign earned two Silver awards: one in Artificial Intelligence (AI), a category in which no Gold was conferred, and one in Experiential Marketing: Live, Digital. Both were won entirely in-house, without consortium backing or external creative support.
The Artslab Creatives team at the Effie Awards Sri Lanka 2025
The Problem
Menstruation remains one of Sri Lanka’s most entrenched cultural silences. Research by Kantar LMRB (2023) found that 74% of schoolgirls miss school during their periods, driven by stigma and affordability. In rural areas, 46% of girls rely on cloth or go without sanitary protection entirely.
Fems and its HER Foundation had been distributing pads in schools and running menstrual hygiene education programmes. But the impact was remaining invisible beyond beneficiary communities. The digital landscape offered reach, but menstruation was a subject people were reluctant to engage with publicly.
To make it harder still: deepfake AI, the technology the campaign intended to use, was widely feared. High-profile cases of misuse had made it synonymous with manipulation. Asking Sri Lankan users to upload their own face into a deepfake system, for a campaign about menstruation, meant overcoming two powerful cultural barriers at once.
“I just want someone beside me who says, it’s okay, keep going.”
Krithiga, 14, schoolgirl from a rural Sri Lankan community
“Forward and Fearless with Fems” – Sri Lanka’s first AI deepfake campaign for social good.
The Idea: From Spectator to Mentor
The insight that unlocked the campaign was simple but powerful. Empathy does not automatically produce action, particularly around a taboo subject. What people needed was not more awareness content. They needed a mechanism that made participation feel personal, meaningful, and safe.
The campaign’s answer was to let people become the mentor themselves. Instead of watching a story about period poverty, users could put their own face into it, appearing as the trusted adult walking beside a young girl through the fear and stigma surrounding menstruation. Passive viewers became active advocates. The message became the messenger.
The Technology
Building this required constructing something Sri Lanka had never seen: a production-grade, ethically designed AI video personalisation platform capable of processing thousands of individual face-swap requests at scale.
Platform architecture across three pillars: technology, consent, and cultural design.
The system ran on CUDA-powered NVIDIA virtual GPU servers, with Google Cloud handling secure storage. The backend was built on Python and Django; the user-facing microsite on React.js. A custom facial synthesis engine integrated each participant’s face into a pre-produced mentorship film, rendering them as the lead narrator guiding a young girl through cultural stigma.
Ethical design was not a layer added afterwards. It was built into the system’s core. Entry required OTP verification via mobile, ensuring explicit, deliberate consent before any facial data was processed. Users selected their preferred language, Sinhala, Tamil, or English, and their preferred gender variant for the narrative. All uploaded images were automatically deleted within seven days, and clear in-platform communication explained exactly how the AI worked and what would happen to user data.
The share-to-donate mechanic connected digital participation directly to real outcomes: each eligible public share of a generated video triggered a sanitary pad donation through the HER Foundation, tracked in real time on a live dashboard visible to all users.
The campaign microsite, showing the real-time donation dashboard and user journey.
The Impact
The campaign reached 1.8 million people across Meta and YouTube, generating over 5 million impressions. More than 7,000 personalized mentorship videos were created. Of these, 509 were eligible for the share-to-donate mechanic, resulting in 1,527 girls receiving pad packs directly through the HER Foundation. Social listening recorded 92% positive sentiment from campaign-related engagement. The campaign also triggered partnerships with the Lions Club of Galle, the Saheli Foundation, and Parenthrive, extending reach to a further 2,000 girls and mothers.
The work did not stop at the screen. Phase Three brought the campaign into physical spaces: Fems conducted inclusive menstrual health education sessions at more than 20 schools across Sri Lanka, involving girls, boys, and male teachers. More than 17,900 students were reached in total.
Phase Three school visits brought the campaign’s message into classrooms across Sri Lanka.
Technology can be redirected. A tool most people feared was used here to build trust. A subject most people avoided became something thousands chose to put their name and face to. For Artslab, these two Silver Effies are a validation of a belief we have held since we started: that creativity and technology, used with genuine purpose, can move people in ways that matter.
