Why Andrex Is Helping the UK Flush Its Toilet Inhibitions

Matt> It's been about 18 months, probably even slightly longer, in the making. It actually came from taking a step back about where we wanted to go in the future and what it was going to take to stay relevant. But also realising that probably we had a responsibility to do something bigger than flog our products. So we spent quite a long time understanding what really goes on in people's subconscious. 

This is a category that generally people try and avoid. And that's the big insight that struck us.

When you start unpicking avoidance, it gets quite deep. People generally try not to think about it, talk about it, they don't spend much time in the aisle because it's embarrassing and all this kind of stuff. You could keep that at a quite superficial level. That's fine. But actually what we were finding is it really has quite a big impact on certain things. 

On an individual level people generally don't feel that clean after using the toilet. It means that they're then not making the best choices. It means that people hold it in a lot, which isn't very good for you. It makes you feel uncomfortable. It means that people don't know how to teach their kids the best hygiene habits when they have a bit of an avoidant feeling themselves. The UK is one of the latest countries for toilet training. And that is mainly because people find it uncomfortable and hard. They don't know how to teach their kids habits. They don't want to be standing in the bathroom watching their child have a poo. It's quite confronting and embarrassing. And so they delay it. That has knock-on impacts on schools. You've got one in four kids going to school not properly toilet trained, and then a million hours lost because teachers are spending a lot of time in the toilet. 

We were talking at the time to Bowel Cancer UK who's one of our one of our main partners. When you realise that more than half of people in the UK would wait six months between having a change in their bowel health to going and seeing a GP, actually, there's something a lot bigger here. That six months could be the difference between stage one cancer and stage four cancer. At stage one, there's a 90% chance to survive, and at stage four, there's a 90% chance you won't. 

18 months ago, we said we need a greater sense of mission. So we set a brand mission to help people be able to confront their own intimate wellness and ultimately adopt healthier habits. That's driven everything that we've done since. That's the genesis of this project and the start of this comms platform, but it's also inspiring what we do with innovation, whether it's product innovation, non product innovation, tools like our GoTime app, which is helping parents feel more comfortable teaching their kids the right habits. It's driving everything we do. 

Ben> There are so many levels to this. Andrex has for a long time been the number-one toilet roll brand in the UK. Historically we've led the market in terms of the products we brought out to the world, which time and time again have tried to be emulated by the competitive set. There was a big responsibility to act like the market leader, not just simply bringing new products to the market, but helping society. 

They’re deeply ingrained, these avoidance issues, and I think they're far more pronounced here than elsewhere. One in four people will not have the ability to look at their own poo because they think it's disgusting or they're ashamed of it. By not looking at what comes out of their body, they're missing all sorts of health implications. At the extreme end it can be really very alarming because you're missing out on things that could be saving your life, not only looking for signs of bowel cancer, but there are daily things that you could be seeing. 

In other cultures – the Netherlands, Germany and other places – you're encouraged to look at your poo every single day as the single best barometer of your physical and mental health. This is taught to people on the continent, but here we have these ridiculous avoidance issues and it's crippling us as a nation. Matt's got this fantastic expression: we are socially constipated. We can't even look at our own poo, let alone discuss it. It's an issue. So we strongly believe as the market leader in this category, we have a responsibility to act like a leader and affect change that can not just affect our bottom line, but actually the health of the nation.

Kyle> In order to make a difference, you have to stand out. You have to help people confront their own intimate wellness, because otherwise it's totally avoidable.

Even in executional terms of how you bring this whole thing to life, it's super important. This work could become a gag fest. It could be skit after skit after skit. But there's a level of restraint in the work that I think is testament to everyone being really solidly on one path. In that office film, for example, where we just have one scene – she trades up a magazine for something thicker – the restraint just to execute that one walk. Our storyboards were: a lady's sat at her chair, she walks to the toilet, she picks up a magazine, she goes to the toilet. The executions are living and breathing the same confidence we're trying to get people to embody.

Matt> In our society we use toilet humour to avoid confronting the truth. And so I think what Kyle has done amazingly is start with truth. If it comes from a place of truth, it forces you to relate to it. We talk about being 'audaciously disarming'. We will use wit and humour to disarm but we won't use it to mask over and enable you to avoid it. I think there's a really fine distinction that only a team that are creative geniuses can do. This could have been bog-standard (pardon the pun) humour and everyone would have been able to laugh it off. What the pieces actually do is use wit to enable you to disarm, to then be able to self reflect. I think that's a really clever, very hard thing to do.

Ben> That smart sidestep of shifting something that has historically been used to mask to disarm is a deft move, but it's something that can be continued to be used. The first form of humour that children learn is toilet humour. Toilet humour is generally born out of a means to deal with anxiety. But if you twist it and apply it in a way that helps you disarm without masking, then it's a smart move. It's actually playing into the positive codes of British society to address their own issues.

Kyle> Ben's done some amazing work on the brief. Compare us to other nations, we are basically a nation of prudes when it comes to this subject. But the one thing we are top of the world at is ripping the piss out of each other in humour, self deprecation and wit. I worked for five years in America and they are not. There's a certain trait here that we could pull on to disarm that conversation. 

For example, the 'Paid to Poo' one that's in the business section. That, to me, is a great example of where we don't need to go to the gutter and be crass. We can do it with wit and intelligence and show up in different places in different styles. When someone sees that in the business section and we're actually breaking down economics in a cost of living crisis of why you should sit in the toilet. 

Ben> The choice of him sitting in an office chair, rather than the toilet throne. It's arguably a brave decision, but it's one that makes the execution so much more powerful. Those small details make a massive difference. 

Kyle> What Matt said about insight is everything to me on this. The first thing we did was get all the creatives to talk about the truths. 

I've got a daughter who's six years old and is literally more comfortable taking a dump than I am. How can that be right? 

We talked about all these scenarios of people when they went on first dates, you will have seen the lady who was on the date who tried to throw the poo out the window and got trapped. 

We did a piece of research. And as the stereotypical creative guy I hate those research spreadsheets. But it was the single greatest spreadsheet I've ever received. It broke down real people's stories of their experience in this area. Things like, for example, people go on holiday together and they don't want to poo in the same room so they go down to reception. Or people who go to a different level at work to go for a poo. When I look at the films we picked, 'First Office Poo' because 47% of this country have held their poo at work. That's quite a universal truth. That's the reason we selected that piece of work to kick it off. But there's a lot more to come.

Matt> There's one creative decision that I think is really interesting. This is parallel universe stuff. We had a long conversation about whether or not like the lady in the office or the guy sliding in the toilet should be holding a roll of Andrex. And actually, Kyle and the team pushed really hard for the product being pride of place. We were like, 'I'm not sure you need it. Isn't it more just about his feelings?' So we had this weird moment where we were saying don't put our product in the ads and the agency was saying no, definitely do.

Kyle> The toilet roll itself is a provocation. It's embarrassing to carry toilet roll out of the supermarket. I would have wanted it hidden in a bag. Whereas like in the ads, we are showing people who are using the roll. The lady taking it out of the cabinet and walking through the office is a signal – a provocation in and of itself, which is what I mean when I say we don't need gags. That is the wall of empowerment.

We've got so many more executions coming. At the weekend we had digital vans going around town with executions. For example outside 'Frozen' on Drury Lane and we had a huge headline: 'Let It Go' and just a face straining. We've aligned it perfectly for when theatre goers are going to be there. That conceptual view can be everything for how we show up and have that wit and humour.

I love details and nuggets. There's things like 'Live Unclenched', for example. I love that we talked about how we could embody the attitude as much as possible. And that started off as a portrait. And then with Jack [Walker], our amazing head of art, we talked about kerning out the typography to make you feel it and therefore it became a 96 sheet, which just adds that little bit more of the brand's thinking. It has a wit.

Matt> I love the use of music and sound. What I think has been brilliant is that we will often use music with an element of wit to it. Drops or changes where it makes it quite funny. That moment where she picks the book up and the track drops into this quite heavy part. There's a couple of other executions where it builds and then cuts straight back to reality, back to actually this isn't that big a deal, you're just in an office, the phone's ringing or whatever it might be. Really clever, subtle touches of sound to enhance the natural drama or tension that exists, but then to break it and go 'this isn't a big deal'. 

The other one that I think happened organically is that in a lot of the pieces, you'll see the main protagonist at the end, just make one look to the camera. And I think it's a really clever way of saying 'over to you,' embrace the self reflection almost by looking at the viewer with a knowing look.

Kyle> There are very few directors in the world who could execute this really well. Andreas was the very top of that list for the way that he nails humour, casting, music. He pushed us into different places and that's how great work gets made. He's brilliant. He understood that restraint. We talked about 'a single breath film'. It should feel like a single moment from a film more than an ad. I don't want to make ads. I want to make single breath films – truthful moments that are insightful. 

Matt> It is very important for our brand because the first and most important thing it does is signify trust. So when we're trying to get into a topic that has an element of self-reflection and self-confrontation, the puppy is a very good way of disarming. We considered what role it should play and how it can help us trigger that self-reflection. 

The puppy was born ultimately as a metaphor for the functional attributes of our product, but in many ways, it was also a mechanism for avoiding what you actually use the product for. So the intentional shift we made, which Ben and the team pushed was, it now needs to be a device to trigger self-reflection – or a partner for confidence. The puppy will always show up at a moment where there's a choice to either get comfortable or stay constipated (either literally or metaphorically) and then to be there with you as you get ridiculously confident.

Ben> It's a similar point to reutilising humour in a specific way from being something that masks to something that drives reappraisal and disarms. Arguably, there is nothing more disarming than a cute puppy. It was something that not only is such an incredibly powerful brand cue, it's something that could actually play a much bigger role for the brand. There is psychology in the relationship to the way humans interact with puppies that we apply to this set of communication, will continue to apply. And this might sound like a trite comment, but we're never going to throw the puppy out with the bathwater. The puppy is always going to be integral to the brand and so it should be. It's just that it can play a more pertinent role than just being a cipher for product properties – soft, cosy, cute.

There weren't any staged shots. There have been times in Andrex's history where Puppy wranglers were heavily involved in order to try to get the puppy to do certain things. This wasn't necessary because the puppy being a puppy in an authentic way felt more real. Puppies do turn their head and look at you in a way that's communicating something. We just utilised that properly in order for our message to take greater power.

Kyle> Often the first take and they nail it. I couldn't believe it. Best actors on the shoot.

Matt> Everything I've seen so far has been quite overwhelmingly positive. And for lots of different reasons. It's an amazing number of people saying thank you, they had this problem or someone in their family experienced this, whether it's as extreme as having cancer or just getting over hangups. There's been quite a lot of sense of people understanding why we're doing this. There are so many reasons why we're doing this that it makes it quite easy to have conviction in it. 

The unexpectedness of it and the wit is coming through a lot.

And we've also had a few people questioning it or complaining, but in many ways, it shows that it's cutting through. We've always said we want this programme to be unavoidable, because it has to be if it's going to get over the stigma or avoidance culture that we'd got. If it wasn't doing that I'd be more concerned. That's exactly why we are going to do it. It is important and it will help people feel better or change their habits or teach their children or whatever it might be. 

Kyle> It's amazing how much people have already understood it, picked it up. I'm getting so many messages about if I can make T-shirts of the lines, for example. Industry wise, hundreds of creatives saying they want to work here. My younger brother who is 18 shared it on his socials like 'my brother did this'. That's the biggest kudos. We've only really just got it out industry wise. That next step is getting it adopted by the public. That's what I want to see next.

Matt> A lot of people have said to me along the way that this is really brave. Bold, yes. But they've often said 'brave'. I think sometimes when they mean risky. And I think there are three reasons why I haven't felt like this is brave; it's felt obvious: One is the mission - that sense of real clarity of knowing what we need to do in culture. The second is that it’s always come from truth. It's not made up. But the third one is that I've always had a pretty unwavering belief in this team FCB and in our partnership, and in people like Andreas. That means a lot when it comes to getting to work that's of this level. I don't think it would have happened without that trust, partnership and collective sense of what we were trying to achieve. 

It's a really important reflection on what it takes to get to work that can change culture. That's why I hate the term client, because it creates hierarchies and structures that are ridiculous. Partnership's definitely been one of the keys to unlocking the level and type of work that is coming out. These guys and the rest of the team are individually brilliant, but collectively that mission has been the thing that's really meant that it happened.