Vaginas Uncensored: Bodyform on shaking up social with 'Vaginas Uncensored'
Bodyform and Tangerine have won the Content for Good category and the Grand Prix at The Drum Awards for Content. Here is the award-winning case study.
Drive reappraisal of the already-famous Bodyform brand and product range, in celebration of its 40th birthday. Continue Bodyform’s journey as a challenger brand and put them at the center of attention to generate brand power (awareness and understanding of key messages).
Strategy
Make Bodyform more than just a period product brand by raising awareness of the censorship around women+’s health, educate audiences to help drive genuine, positive change. Break taboos and be bold, to get cut through and continue to be a category first.
Intel:
When it comes to women+’s health, there’s a big job to be done. Not only do women+ not talk about their health openly, but social media actually censors words around women+’s health. Vagina is one of the most censored words on social media. Sharing a vulva online can get you banned from social media. Shocked? Our audience had no idea either. 37% were self-censoring and didn’t even know it! We’re pre-conditioned to not talk about women+’s health.
What did we do?
Bodyform’s campaign; Vaginas Uncensored, did exactly that, it uncensored vaginas. To mark 40 years of Bodyform, we uncensored the word vagina, along with 39 other words that you can’t say due to censorship. Revealing one word a day, for 40 days. We created a range of content, collating real people’s stories and experiences, working with influencers and our campaign ambassador Cherry Healey to open up conversations and encourage people to talk openly about their vulvas, clitoris, endometriosis and all the other bits in between (literally). We inevitably got censored… in fact half of the content was censored across Meta, TikTok, and Twitter. But we kept pushing, turning it into positive PR stories to further the cause.
The results:
The campaign reached 8.2 million on social (134% KPI)
1182k social engagements (226% KPI)
10 million social media impressions
3.9 million video views, with an average watch time of 10s and 5,500 attentive seconds per mille (Tangerine agency metric for measuring attention beyond views and watch time)
84 pieces of coverage including BBC Radio 4, Metro, The Telegraph (online & print), Mail Online, Daily Mail, Huff Post, Metro, Cosmo, Glamour.
Positive sentiment tracking through online listening showed an increase in positive sentiment from 3% pre-campaign to 91% mid-campaign.
Our top-performing video was originally banned on TikTok but following appeals and conversations with the platform, we had this ad rejection revoked and a response saying TikTok: “are continually improving our processes to better address potentially problematic content while minimizing incorrect removals. “At TikTok, we work hard to ensure our platform is a safe space and welcome content on important topics like women's health. We are open about the fact that we don't always get every decision right, which is why we continue to invest at scale in our safety operations.”