Blood, Sweat and Bravery: How AMV BBDO and Essity Shaped Each Other
The Bodyform and Knix owner reflects on 10 years of busting taboos alongside its agency partner.
Enduring client-agency relationships are a rarity in advertising. Between 1987 and 2020, the average length of these partnerships has steadily declined from seven years to less than three, according to The Bedford Group.
Consumer care brand Essity, owner of Libresse, Bodyform, Tena and Knix, has bucked this trend alongside Omnicom-owned creative agency AMV BBDO, with 2024 marking the duo’s 10-year anniversary. Over the course of a decade, the Essity-AMV BBDO collaboration has yielded taboo-busting work in categories from menstrual care to incontinence. The relationship even encouraged Essity to hold up a mirror to its core business values, pivoting its corporate purpose to “breaking barriers” in the health and hygiene category.
“These past 10 years have given us a very high level of trust,” Tuomas Yrjölä, president of global brand, innovation and sustainability at Essity, told Adweek. “There’s a clarity between us both, a shared language and a shared vision on the importance of brand purpose and breaking barriers.” He added: “All that drives speed and efficiency, we don’t need to debate or start all over again each time it comes to deciding on a strategy. We can focus all our efforts on pushing for great creative work.”
Beyond helping the business define its core purpose, Essity and AMV’s longstanding relationship has yielded other fruit, including a sales bump. In Q3 of 2023, the business reported a net sales increase of 8.5% to $3.9 billion. It’s also bulked up AMV’s trophy cabinet, with consistent accolades for the pair at awards shows including Cannes Lions, D&AD and the Clios.
In an industry increasingly preoccupied with short-termism and project work in favor of the traditional AOR model, AMV BBDO and Essity’s relationship offers a window into what can happen when brands and agencies stick things out.
The best known stigma-shattering work from the duo came in 2017 with “Blood Normal,” a campaign for sanitary brand Libresse (known as Bodyform in the U.K.), which switched out blue liquid for real period blood. Unremarkable in theory but boundary-pushing in practice, the work courted buzz and complaints in equal measure in markets from the U.K. to Brazil to Australia.
Margaux Revol, strategy partner at AMV BBDO, said both the client and the agency team were, naturally, “nervous” about launching the global push, which followed an initial idea called “Live Fearless” that also focused on empowering women.
They needn’t have worried though; the campaign was based on Essity’s own 10,000-person study that showed 74% of men and women wanted to see more realistic period ads. By bringing blood out of the dark, onto screens and into the conversation, “Blood Normal” paved a positive path for girls and women. The campaign launched in four countries, but reached over 32, as well as 4.5 billion people thanks to PR and social media coverage.
“We started with this more purpose-led advertising because we thought it was the right thing to do,” said Yrjölä. “But it quickly resonated with customers, and as we’ve evolved we’ve found a way to inject and integrate it into everything we do. AMV played a huge part in that.” In 2018, Essity changed its corporate mantra to one based around “breaking barriers to well-being” for consumers and caregivers across the globe. “It started with ‘Blood Normal,’ which helped us codify what works, and that has evolved over time,” Yrjölä continued.
Since then, Revol’s team has delivered dial-moving campaigns for Libresse. “Viva La Vulva,” landed in 2018 as a kaleidoscopic ode to the female anatomy intended to move the brand beyond period care into intimate care. Elsewhere, “Womb Stories,” which confronted everything from IVF treatment to endometriosis cramps and menopausal hot flashes and nipple hairs, shone a light on the unseen, unspoken and unknown truths about the physical experiences of people with uteruses.
AMV and Essity work together to come up with briefs. Sometimes these come in response to a new product, other times they’re born from a cultural insight.
All of AMV’s work for Essity is underpinned by data, as well as a close eye on conversations happening on platforms like TikTok and X (formerly Twitter). Revol is dedicated, in practice, to what she describes as “radical empathy”. “With ‘Womb Stories,’ for instance, we asked the questions no one else was asking and dug deeper into the complex experiences people had with their bodies,” she asserted. “We gleaned a huge amount of insight that allowed us to make people feel seen and understood. Being brave is about going into darkness as well as light.” It’s not just been about feminine hygiene either—groundbreaking work for Tena has helped shatter stigmas around issues including male incontinence and menopause.
For Yrjölä, measuring the commercial impact of this purpose is just as important as creating the magic in the first place, which is why Essity’s digital, marketing and insights teams work in tandem to establish and track success. “Sales, market penetration and growth are at the forefront of everything we do too,” he said. “We keep our marketers accountable on business metrics... and we’ve proven time and again that creativity, connecting with audiences, brand trust and growth are interlinked.”
Keeping a time-honored relationship fresh is an age-old conundrum, but AMV BBDO regularly rotates the creatives working across the account to ensure sparks still fly.
“We also act like journalists, we’re always looking out for the next story to tell,” said Revol. She finished: “That means the work doesn’t go along on a geographical territory. People say to me: ‘Oh, OK, you’ve done period blood, you’ve shown vulvas, what’s next? The anus. The answer is no —well, unless we have a product for that—we want to do things that make people feel understood and seen.”