How E45’s Trans-Positive Skincare Ad Goes Beyond Advertising

Sally> I work for a company called Karo, a Swedish consumer healthcare company. We acquired E45 two and a half years ago with a view that it needed dusting off. It's a beautiful brand. Everybody loved it, but it just wasn't relevant anymore. So that's been what we've been doing with the brand for the past couple of years. 

As part of that, we've been rethinking how we reach the right consumers. how we reset how people perceive skincare and how they perceive E45. The core to that is kind of this communication idea, which is we exist to sort of help people's skin feel more comfortable. That little pot of E45 that is in everybody's bathroom cupboard, almost forgotten, but solves a multitude of skin problems. If we can make people's skin feel more comfortable than then we know that we can make them feel more comfortable in their skin. That's what we're going with. And then about maybe nine months ago, we put the challenge to T&Pm to find the groups of people in the world who feel the most uncomfortable in their skin - and let's find a way to help them. 

That's when Dan and Mika came with this creative idea, because it's authentic to the brand. Genuinely the transgender community feel uncomfortable in their skin, obviously, from a societal, environmental point of view, but also, there are impacts on your skin of transitioning. And no one talks about it. It's not in any of the NHS guidelines. When you go to your GP or a clinic, there are other things on the list of things to talk about, but no one tells you about the impact it's going to have on your skin. That's where our start point was. In advertising, we can draw attention to this. And obviously, with Channel 4 and the award, and the ability to really shine some light on this challenge, but also portray this community in a very normal light. 

Sally> We've got the potential because it's a brand whose team interacts with healthcare professionals, day in, day out. We talk to pharmacists, GPs, hospitals, so we had the ability to make a real change. There's a longer-term investment for us around how we see this change through to live conversations between GPs, between people in transgender clinics with their patients: 'Do you know this is probably going to happen to your skin? Be prepared for it. This is what you can do about it.' 

There's a lot of work subsequently that we've done now, we've had a paper approved and published on the impact of transitioning on skin. It's going to be presented at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health 28th Scientific Symposium in Lisbon in September. So then we start to get this message out to the world healthcare professional community. So alongside the advertising there's a bigger piece where we've got a right to have a voice and effect to change.

Sally> It's a brilliant process. Hats off to them on the award and the way they really live true to their purpose of change through entertainment. They live that. There was a process of putting in the nomination, getting that together. Then the pitch process was super thorough. We got asked some really tough questions such as 'How will you deal with the backlash?' 'How will you protect the talent?' 'How will you represent their lives in an authentic way?' Which I hope we answered in the execution and in the process. Obviously, we won the pitch, but it was then a real sense of partnership right the way through the creative process. 

We built how we were going to land it, and how we were going to make sure that we took the right input and built it with and alongside the LGBTQIA+ full community, but particularly the trans community. Even before we pitched it, and before we started putting pen to paper on script, we'd already brought in the views of some key people within the community. That carried on all the way through right from pre production up to production, safeguarding the talent during the creative process, but also in publication, making sure that we were clear on how we were going to safeguard and protect our talent.

Sally> We did a lot of preparation for it, because what we didn't ever want to be in was a position where we went with it and then we had to pull back. We were never going to do that. So therefore we had to second guess every reaction. And what's been lovely is that, actually, yes, of course there's been some backlash, but we've been prepared for it. And where we've had to, we have protected the talent if there's been anything on social that has personally made any of the talent feel threatened. 

But other than that, actually, what has been really, really rewarding to see is how the community on social media has kind of balanced out the conversation and the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. We've had 72% emotion of joy a month into the campaign on our social monitoring heat tracking. 

We prepared really well. We spoke to the community in great depth and included them all the way through, because we wanted to make sure that it felt like it had come from and with them. That was important. And it's paid off. 

We were very clear that we could never have done this if we weren't coming from a point of view of authenticity for the brand. So because we're known by healthcare professionals, because we have always been all about making people's skin feel more comfortable, it was a natural extension for us. It wasn't some kind of forced fit for the brand, which I think is often the mistake – that people just sort of slap something onto an agenda, which is absolutely not what we were ever going to do.

Sally> The brilliant team at Academy found us a great range of talent, some that were performers and some that had never been in front of a camera before. But we had so many people wanting to be involved. And, yeah, it was, it was kind of, it was cast really broadly. 

Sally> There are so many. The full 90-second edit is just beautiful. The craftsmanship and the kind of attention to detail all the way through that T&Pm paid has just been phenomenal. There's a favourite bit for me with the lady who's in the bath in the middle.She looks in the mirror, and she just has that quick reflection of, 'yeah, this is me', which I absolutely love. But there are also the little looks to the camera, the kind of, 'I'm with you'. I also love the bus stop scene, because that shows allyship. It shows people who are out there in the world, living their lives and not encountering the issues that the trans community encounter day in, day out, just going, 'I feel your pain'. And we carefully crafted that reaction so that it was very non judgmental. It was a sign of allyship. So I love that. I love the nod to 'The Birth of Venus' in the last scene, which is just beautiful. I love the shark because I knew nothing about that meme. And I've learned so much as I've gone along the process. Obviously the HRT pot as well, which is just lovely. There are just things interspersed all the way through it, which, every time I watch it, make me super proud of the craft that went into it.

Sally> There's a couple of things. Channel 4 do the 'Mirror on' research and they did 'Mirror on Transgender People’ this year. One of the big things was, 'Just show us in a normal light. Just show us going about our normal day and doing normal things.' And that was what was really appreciated, I think, about the execution. But therefore, what we will commit to do going forward is just to include all walks of life in our advertising going forward. So that's like commitment number one, which is an easy change to make.

But I think the piece underneath this activity is then about healthcare professionals. We've now got guidance and material on the impact of transitioning on your skin in all of the transgender clinics across the country. We're hoping to have a feature in a webinar with the Royal College of GPs within the next couple of months as well. And as I say, this paper has been published summarising the impacts on the skin, which will then be presented at the conference in September. And all of the content and advice etc., is on our website. And the search traffic to those pages has exponentially increased. We know that we can continue to have an impact, which is really important.

Sally> We're starting to see an increase in our search traffic on the website. We don't have any official sales data yet broken down by audience, but anecdotally we're hearing an amazing reaction from younger audiences, which is really great. We're hearing a good reaction from everybody, but the younger audience is a particular uptick. Anecdotally, we have had a great deal of really positive feedback from the community, from allies to the community. The hope is that based on this anecdotal feedback, for every bit of feedback you hear, there is another conversation that you've sparked that's gone on behind it, that you will never know has happened. The raw data on the performance is yet to come because these things take time, but the early signs are really, really good.

Sally> It's precisely because we are a big brand. There's 98% awareness of E45. If you don't have it in your house, you're almost certainly aware of it. As such, you've got even more capacity to make a difference. That's exactly what the Channel 4 initiative is about, basically – it's about putting this stuff in the mainstream. Every single time anyone enters this space, it just makes things a little bit easier for that community. Hopefully we just made it a little bit easier for the community.