AMV BBDO Answer “What Do You Wish You’d Been Told?” for Libresse / Bodyform
Femcare brand Libresse / Bodyform has recently launched yet another viscerally provoking campaign, ‘Never Just a Period’, in collaboration with longtime partner AMV BBDO, spotlighting the lack of knowledge when it comes to the reality of menstrual experiences, from first periods to pain and discharge smell.
SMUGGLER’s Lucy Forbes directed the film central to the campaign – an abstract, funny, visceral cinematic masterpiece, utilising comedy, mixed-media and an orchestra as its backdrop. Twisting, clenching, cringing, bleeding, laughing and crying are all part of women+’s experience of their own bodies, and often these feelings come without any warning or explanation – something notoriously hard to depict in film, and for which SMUGGLER had to bring out the whole toolbox.
“This project hit so many chords for me,” says Lucy. “So many memories of not knowing what the hell was going on with my body. The confusion, worry, shame. And it shines a light on things that I had literally no idea about - perimenopausal blood clots? Wtf?”
She continues: “There is such a huge gap between what we’re told and what we experience. It’s absurd. It’s complicated. It’s emotional. But it’s also kind of funny.”
“Despite the ancient lineage of women who have come before us, we know so little about our bodies. As a mum of two young daughters, I have lived, breathed, and felt so much of this campaign.”
Similarly to Lucy, many women+ continue to find out new nuggets (or horrifying icebergs) of information about their menstrual cycles throughout their life. In fact, AMV’s research pointed out that 59% of people who menstruate wish they’d been taught more about their periods and intimate health. This is why the film ends on the poignant question: “What do you wish you’d been told?”
Margaux Revol, strategy partner and head of brand at AMV tells us that this piece of data in particular wasn’t more important than all the rest, but it became most emblematic of the lifetime of questions people with periods go through.
“You would have thought after 300,000 years of homo sapiens, surely nothing about periods would still be a mystery by now. But the vast majority of girls feel unprepared and unsettled, and what’s worse, the confusion never seems to ever really dissipate.”
Margaux says that now is the time to change the narrative and actually start preparing women+ for a lifetime in their bodies. This is why, after exposing “the wild dissonances and letting out a universal, collective sigh about the mad status quo,” the brand and the agency chose to close the film with an invitation for women+ to reflect on everything they should have been told, and on how much pain could have been averted with the right preparation.
Margaux explains that the thinking behind the research was to properly understand the experiences, emotions and knowledge in relation to taboos, especially following the ‘Bloodnormal’ campaign from 2017, after which other brands joined the discussion. But this was about much more than just breaking the silence on spicy topics.
“What nobody has really done,” Margaux says, “is to properly try and understand how our experience and exposure to knowledge can be formative, in positive ways or in devastatingly negative ways.”
She adds: “Our culture will keep being a gigantic taboo factory that negatively impacts women+’s health if we don’t tell the truth and the whole truth about our bodies. So, our campaign carries the energy of anger about this situation, but also the hope that it can change.”
Above: Fun on set
Nadja Lossgott, chief creative officer at AMV adds that the agency always tries to approach their creative with “the utmost empathy” and from personal experiences. “We will ask ourselves how we would have wanted to be told.” This is reflected in the balance of education and laughter, and the positioning of truth telling against fear mongering, all evident in the film.
Nadja Lossgott, chief creative officer at AMV adds that the agency always tries to approach their creative with “the utmost empathy” and from personal experiences. “We will ask ourselves how we would have wanted to be told.” This is reflected in the balance of education and laughter, and the positioning of truth telling against fear mongering, all evident in the film.
“It’s so important to be informed in the most entertaining, creative and emotional way,” says Nadja. “In so much of what we go through in life, the physical is also the emotional. And that’s the gap we bridge.”
To help bridge this gap, the team had to find the right wording, and ‘Never Just a Period’ stuck, as the perfect creative distillation of 300,000 years of misunderstanding. “Those four words are freighted with every dismissal and every minimisation,” Nadja says.
“It’s never just a period. It’s never just a bit of pain. It’s never just the pill. It’s never just motherhood. It’s never just an IUD insertion. It’s never just a pinch. And it’s definitely not just you. It’s us. All of us.”
To depict all these feelings and more, the film had to portray a myriad of sensory experiences, and that’s where mixed media came in handy. We know from other Libresse / Bodyform campaigns, the usage of animation, colour, sound and metaphor are all powerful tools when portraying pain, confusion and frustration. And if it takes felted stop-motion uteruses for the brand to show women+ that they are being seen and understood, they’re doing it.
“When it comes to women+’s bodies, life as a whole sings a maximalist tune. The experience is both emotional and physical. Periods and everything that surrounds them can be explained rationally, biologically, but they are lived viscerally, emotionally, sensorially. It’s our job to honour that experience in the way we visually translate those feelings and stitch the world together,” says Nicholas Hulley, chief creative officer at AMV.
This led to the creation of the deeply textural, multi-layered visceral world in the campaign film – what Nick calls “a warm and funny explosion of truth.” Framestore’s creative director Sharon Lock who worked on the film’s post production shared the sentiment: “I love the emotional storytelling that comes with working on another groundbreaking Essity campaign. Just when you think you can’t be surprised, the bar moves yet again.
Above: Even jelly was used on set to depict some textures!
“These campaigns tell it like it is, with humour and emotion, undoing the stories we grew up with. There’s more information in this two-minute film than I ever learnt in school,” Sharon adds.
The music, a unique composition by Soundtree, combining ‘Toccata’ and ‘Fugue’ in D minor by Bach with ‘Over and Over’ by Hot Chip, added another layer of emotional relatability, speaking to the “historic injustice while providing a galvanising anthem for change.” Soundtree founder and composer Peter Raeburn said: “Working on this project was a really interesting and compelling challenge. Helping tell this essential story from today’s perspective needed a unique collaboration.”
The previous Libresse / Bodyform campaigns remain as some of the most recognisable and memorable pieces of work in the category. Nick says that the goal is to stay creatively unique with each addition to the family, allowing freshness to come through and not stagnating in the creative expression.
New insights aren’t the only thing at the bottom of this either. “We have also built a base with strong pillars that hold the brand,” shares Nick. “A visual world and a strategic one that strives to be outstandingly meaningful to women+. We are constantly reading, researching and being inspired by conversations, so that the work feels organically stitched together.”
Things aren’t always about selling a product - with Libresse / Bodyform, it looks like what stands at the core of their mission is to really help women not feel alone, even with the things they might not fully understand about themselves. The brand isn’t looking for a formula to shock consumers with each campaign, Margaux reassures us.
“The winning formula is not to go down a list of taboos and confront people by showing them, unlike what some have commented or assumed when we released ‘Wombstories’ after ‘Viva la Vulva’ following ‘Bloodnormal’,” she says. “We have not been on a geographical conquest of women+’s bodies, rather on a vertical quest for deeper and deeper understanding of women+’s relationship with their periods and their bodies. What experiences and emotions they go through. And how we can represent and support them better.”
“Only by doing this constant exercise of better understanding them can we leave them feeling outstandingly understood. And funnily enough, when we show we listen, it pays off.”
