Campaign Trail is our evaluation of a few of the perfect latest creative efforts from the marketing world. View past columns within the archives here.
For the last several years, brands have worked to normalize taboo topics, especially when marketing products for girls’s bodies. Still, stigmas around menstruation persist, providing a chance for brands to rectify issues which were exacerbated by promoting of the past.
Since its launch in 2010, Kimberly-Clark brand U by Kotex has worked to bring truth and transparency to menstrual health. The brand was the primary to openly display pads on shelves and use a red liquid in its ads as an alternative of the mysterious blue substance regularly used by period care brands.
“We’ve been breaking down period stigmas ever since [our] inception,” said Mindy Langelin, senior brand manager for U by Kotex. “We feel like we have got really strong roots that this latest work pays rent to.”
Despite the work by brands like U by Kotex, stigmas around periods remain, with some women whispering about and assigning nicknames to their periods, or hiding pads up their sleeves on the option to the restroom, Langelin explained.
“All of that isn’t normal, so the main target for this work was to finish the silence and say no to all of that embarrassment and just normalize the thing that’s essentially the most normal — it happens so often that it’s actually called a cycle,” Langelin said.
Bold, vibrant, confident
With that in mind, the brand’s latest campaign is clear-cut, from its title on down. “Normalize Periods” includes daring and vibrant video spots that feature women confidently talking about their bodies using anatomical terms like vagina and vulva. To promote a charcoal filter that neutralizes odor as an alternative of masking it, the ads note that scents like “ocean breeze” and “lush lilac” are good for candles, but not vaginas. Spots and social elements focused on the raised center of U by Kotex pads include taglines “Vulvas are curvy. Now your pads are too” and “Made with labia majoras in mind.”
“We’re not going to draw back from what has been considered taboo language,” Langelin said. “We know that is a stark contrast to a number of the euphemisms that do dominate the category today, but we see it as a commitment to making a more open dialogue around periods.”
While the euphemism-free ads are prone to have attention-grabbing and scroll-stopping power, U by Kotex is considering greater than simply a campaign that raises brand awareness.
“It goes a lot deeper than that, to essentially get at the center of normalizing the conversations and providing the language that girls can use,” Langelin said. “Understanding their anatomy and the way their period works just gets you one step closer into understanding your personal health and wellness, and equipping with that language was critical for us.”
The campaign’s creative, media planning, social media and PR were handled by Ogilvy New York, Mindshare, VaynerMedia and M Booth Health, respectively. To amplify its message, the trouble also includes a mixture of produced and native social and influencer content across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and Pinterest. Some of that content includes on-the-street testimonials that deal with the charcoal filter innovation.
“We also thought it [would be] helpful to bring it to the streets and to point out consumers who hadn’t necessarily thought of adding an ingredient like charcoal [to pads],” Langelin said, noting that the joy in those videos complements the scent-focused spots.
Along with social elements, the campaign includes a powerful digital placement of CTV ads on YouTube, Hulu and Disney+, plus digital banner ads, a presence on Spotify and a consumer activation. That digital-first approach was chosen to best goal Gen Z and millennial consumers and requires a balance of produced and native assets, especially on TikTok, a dominant platform for younger consumers.
“There’s a complete conversation happening [on TikTok] around periods called #PeriodTok,” Langelin added. “If our ambition is to normalize periods, what higher option to do it than to go to where the conversation is going on and authentically plant ourselves in the course of it?”
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