Bodyform’s ‘Never Just a Period’ lays bare the confusing journey of women’s health

These campaigns have garnered global attention for challenging conventional portrayals of women’s menstrual health. By showcasing the raw and unfiltered realities of periods, menopause and childbirth, for example, they reject airbrushed depictions and embrace a more authentic representation of these experiences.

Now, the brand is addressing the entire spectrum of confusion women face from their first period to their last. The new campaign offers a candid, often humorous exploration of the hurdles related to menstrual health, exposing both internal and external misunderstandings and miseducation.

Coming up with new ideas means the creative team is constantly assessing the zeitgeist and what issues women are currently facing. A lot of that initial information comes from the planners at the ad agency, who offer insight into which doors should be broken down next. Nadja Lossgot and Nick Hulley, AMV BBDO’s chief creative officers, say that being able to have those conversations before any creative treatments has been the key to Bodyform’s successes and allows them to explore different ways of thinking.

“We’ve always talked about it as a truth-telling journey that constantly goes deeper and deeper and expands this truth,” Hulley says. “The team has this constant dance of sharing insights and knowledge, having it confirmed and at some times, confirmed in shocking ways with research.”

He continues that it always begins with empathy and truth but there is a creative journey to keep finding fresh and memorable ways to tell these stories. Lauren Peters and Augustine Cerf are the creative team behind the campaign, having previously worked on ‘Pain Stories’ in 2021. They began working on ‘Never Just a Period’ a year ago.

“We were musing on how hideously misinformed we are about our own bodies and reflecting on the gap between what we’re told and what we experience,” Peters tells us. “It’s all rooted in emotion. How does it feel to be confused, afraid and ashamed constantly because you don’t have the right information? You’re not equipped with the tools to kind of navigate life inside your body.”

It’s the dissonance between what people are taught and what they actually experience. The opening scene of the film shows a young girl seeing blood in her underwear and thinking that she may be dying. This is then followed with heart-pounding music and a collage of dramatic, renaissance-style paintings of fainting women, all the while a knitted uterus waves hello. The paintings unlocked a way to succinctly speak to the historical injustice of miseducation around women’s health. Peters says they are also very “meme-able,” which can be a lot of fun.

“It felt important to juxtapose the culture of minimizing, dismissing and outright ignoring with the scale of how these experiences actually feel. And that's why we ended up with a visual hyperbole that we did, and playing with scale in those kinds of ways,” she continues.

“Because we’re told that these things aren’t important or that they don’t exist, we’re constantly gaslit. So, it’s like, we’re here to tell you that they are big and they are real and they do matter. And we should talk about them.”

Lossgott adds that this balancing act is something that Peters and Cerf have accomplished so brilliantly. “It’s the hardcore nature of what we’re talking about, the sad nature of what we’re talking about, but doing it in a really humorous way. And it’s that thing, if you’re not crying about it, you must laugh; that’s the way of coping.”

From the brand’s perspective, Essity’s global brand communications manager for Femcare, Luciana de Azevedo Lara, says that this has been a new element for the campaign but one they fell in love with instantly. She says that the humor made the heavy topic easier to digest, adding: “It opens more doors for people that might be a bit reluctant to talk about taboos to be suddenly open and invited, to join in with the talk and see themselves in it.”

The marketer admits that they did face some ups and downs ahead of this campaign launch. “We were faced with a situation where we saw, across geographies, a lot of pressure from competition. Obviously from the big players, but we have seen a lot the growth of private label.

“People became more conscious about where they spend their money. So that allowed the retailer brands to gain a lot of space and share in the different countries where we were present. So we said, ‘OK, what’s the next chapter?’”

The brief to AMV BBDO was to regain consumer confidence in the brand, shape perspectives and show that the brand has a deep understanding of these issues. de Azevedo Lara adds: “We go through ups and downs. We put together the brief and the team always come back with something that amazes us.

“Then there’s a long journey, a lot of conversations and a lot of us challenging each other. From a client side, we bring the business perspective, the key things that a campaign needs to do for us. But AMV brings the heart, the mind, the brilliance and the elegance of bringing that to life.”

It’s a collaborative and trusting relationship between all parties involved. Throughout many of the ads that have come before, this mixed-media approach has been prevalent. Peters says that having that bespoke element is crucial for creating a visceral emotion and treating each experience as truthfully as possible.

Throughout the entire process, the creatives and director Lucy Forbes continuously bounced ideas off each other, sharing experiences and weaving them into the narrative. “Yes, we had the script, but then there were also things that formed out of conversations that happened organically that then fed into the filming,” Peters says. “They felt so true because it was all based on stuff that we’ve experienced ourselves.”

With this campaign and the others that have come before it, they are all co-created by people’s feelings and experiences. “You’re explaining something without using rational language; it’s explaining something by using emotional language,” adds Lossgot. “And then hopefully, everybody, no matter if you get your period or not, will understand what we go through.”

Choosing which topics to focus on this time boiled down to assessing which conversations hadn’t had a lot of airtime. “Because of the global nature of the campaign, they had to be extremely visually immediate,” Peters says. “Some insights just felt maybe a little bit too complicated to tell quickly. And so, we filtered things out in that way.”

The entire team agrees that there is a need for more education around menstrual health and this is something that Bodyform is taking seriously. “It comes with a bigger commitment from us as a brand in the future, knowing we’re not perfect, knowing also we have done a lot, but we want to do more in that field,” concludes de Azevedo Lara.

“So, with education, although we have never doubted its importance, I think it came out very clear for us with this campaign and what we have seen and heard from consumers that there is space and a need for us to do much more.”