Bodyform impressed us recently with their new TV ad which breaks conventions by actually featuring the one thing that’s pretty central to their product, which has for years been ‘tastefully’ skirted around: blood.
They’ve also put time and effort into developing a useful set of guides to the monthly cycle, and its affect on your sporting motivation, diet, and general well-being. Because yes boys, PMSing and period-ing do both have a noticeable effect on our sporting prowess (as well as our sporting prowess, training and diet having a pretty substantial effect on our likelyhood of period-ing, too).
It’s not always been this way. Sanitary towel and tampon companies have, in the past, glossed over the cramps and the mood swings and the insatiable hunger, plus the “crimson landslide coming from our uteri” on a monthly basis, favouring euphemistic blue water and images of laughing girls on bicycles (where they’d probably opt for a tampon or a mooncup, not a sanitary towel with a chamois pad TBH, but hey..).
It was this wildly inaccurate marketing approach that Richard picked up on when he contacted Bodyform, via Facebook – commenting hilariously:
Bodyform, however (with the help of an advertising agency, an actress, and a fart consultant) got one up on the comedian when they created a hilarious video response.
“[You’ve] pulled down the veil and exposed the myth, thereby exposing every man to a reality we hoped they would never have to face. You did that Richard, you. Well done.”
In the video, fictional CEO Caroline Williams apologises for the brand’s ‘lying’, and goes on to explain that they had tested more realistic advertising approaches – which reduced men to tears and expressions of horror, causing them to change their strategy.
That strategy, she supposes, had been working – until Richard came along. She states that he’s “pulled down the veil and exposed the myth, thereby exposing every man to a reality we hoped they would never have to face. You did that Richard, you. Well done.”
Finishing the video with a fart, she adds: “you did know that we did that too, didn’t you?”
