Most Creative Marketers: Tanja Grubner

Period advertising was a mess before Tanja Grubner got her hands on it. The category made women feel like Smurfs with its fake blue liquid (more of that later) and patronised the hell out of us with footage of white-shorted models skipping through sunny meadows.

Then came Tanja. When she first took up her role at Essity, she says the positioning of its brands, such as Libresse and Bodyform, felt fundamentally wrong. It failed to resonate with her and, she believed, would not resonate with women.

Today, through award-winning work such as "#Wombstories", her mission to confront taboos surrounding periods has mobilised a cultural shift in perceptions of women’s bodies and attitudes towards menstruation that were deeply entrenched globally.

“The more we tried to understand what women were going through, the more we realised that just giving women products to deal with their period wasn't enough for them to feel confident – because the entire world, the society, the culture we live in, is very hostile towards women when they're on their period,” Grubner explains.

Even the word “taboo” itself is derived from the Polynesian word “tapua”, which translates as “period”.

Yet, as Grubner points out; “We need to acknowledge that periods are healthy. It shows that you can have babies, and it’s the only type of blood that doesn't come from an injury. There is nothing taboo about it.”

In 2016, “Red.Fit” featuring muddy and injured sportswomen biking, boxing and running launched to tackle the taboo about periods in sports. With the tagline "no blood should hold us back", the campaign, which initially nobody wanted to air, went viral.

In 2017, Bodyform became the first brand to feature sanitary pads using red liquid, rather than blue, to demonstrate that periods are normal. Bodyform's video campaign "Blood Normal", broke with convention by showing a woman in the shower with blood running down her thigh, and a man buying sanitary towels.

As the number-five brand in its category, it had to hope that others would jump on the bandwagon and ditch the blue liquid for red. It succeeded. Today, almost all big global brands are advertising with red liquid, while smaller brands or period-pant brands that are new to the market have bypassed blue liquid altogether “because it’s just not normal” says Grubner. “That's something that we triggered, and we're proud.”

The brand has been accused of running such campaigns simply to shock and attract earned media, but Grubner explains the real purpose is to break down barriers to wellbeing: “We do it to stop the disastrous and negative consequences to women's confidence, health and lives. Girls miss school due to lack of access to menstrual products, experience period shaming, and in some countries, they’re not allowed to participate in everyday life and instead sent to ‘period huts.’ In many nations, period products are still heavily taxed, as if it is a luxury that women get their periods, even though we have seen a positive shift in the past year. As a brand, we have the reach and responsibility to open up those dialogues and be trailblazers. I've learned to never give up, because otherwise, the work would never have got out.”

A major achievement has been a change in advertising laws in several markets. When "Blood Normal" was released, it was outlawed in markets including the UK, France, and Australia, but has since been allowed. However, work is still being banned, even in liberal markets like Sweden, where red liquid was recently used as part of launch campaigns for period pants. And not just by traditional conservative media such as TV stations, but also by social media.

Just because the team overcomes one ban, Grubner says it doesn’t mean it’s “done and dusted”. The account team at Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, she says, is “like a squad of Erin Brockoviches,” in the way that they fight with Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, and with media authorities, to get the work out into the world.

“They write lengthy argumentation decks about why the world should see this work, how it is empowering not objectifying or sexualising women, and why all those bans are completely ridiculous,” Grubner says.

The team, led by Grubner with AMV BBDO’s strategy director Margaux Revol, and ECDs Nadja Lossgott and Nick Hulley, has driven the ground-breaking work; from 2016’s "Red.Fit", through "Blood Normal", and the award-winning "Viva La Vulva" and "Womb Stories", up to the most recent work, "#PainStories".

“We’re on a mission,” Grubner says. “Everyone within the brand team is a warrior that uses their energy to ignite the next person, because we know it is the right thing to do. This is what makes us strong as a team, and if we're in a room together, you can't tell who is the client and who is the agency. It's just, we are a team. And if you are in charge of a brand, you can do the right thing.”

From the outset, the work was backed by research from parent company Essity which found 74 per cent of people wanted to see more honest representation of periods in adverts.

Why then, did society have to wait until 2017 for “Blood Normal” to draw attention to period taboo and the striking inadequacy of blue liquid as a proxy for menstrual blood?

“We humans do a lot on autopilot, and we like to stay in our comfort zone, so getting this taboo-breaking work out was never going to be easy. It takes corporate communications out of their comfort zone. It takes legal departments out of their comfort zone. It takes media owners out of their comfort zone.” The team even created a WhatsApp group called “blood” because “sometimes it was so very hard, to keep on going,” Grubner says.

She admits to being driven by equality and justice: “It makes me angry when I see that human beings are not treated fairly, and that's something that keeps me going.”

This is a spark that feeds the flames of the Essity campaigns, where the team is united around the purpose of “breaking down barriers to wellbeing, and trying to create a world without shame and stereotypes and discomfort.”

The team has learnt that consumers are often more ready for change than brand managers, marketers, or large corporations. External legal advisers were concerned, Grubner explains, about showing red liquid for the first time, even though that is the normal colour of periods. But once the work came out, positive consumer reactions flooded in.

One woman in Columbia – where Essity had been advertising with blue liquid for 30 years – said: “Thank God. Finally, I no longer feel like a Smurf.”

How I see it: the world according to Grubner

What do you enjoy most about being a marketer?

“We have the opportunity, managing a global brand, to reach so many consumers that we can actually do good. I told my team today, you're in charge of so many shoots, that you can make a difference every day. You choose how diverse the cast is. You choose how we represent them. I love that we can drive positive change for consumers and for society.”

What makes a good creative marketer?

“To understand that the most powerful campaigns are the ones that make you feel something. Ultimately, to have courage not to follow the standard advertising rules and stereotypes. There are so many ads out there, and lots of them are vanilla. It's always easy to go down the safe route, but it's not the most creative or effective route for brands and for consumers. But in a lot of companies, they don't have the culture to stand out or try something different.”

What’s been feeding your imagination lately?

“The most powerful thing that’s inspired me recently is a book called Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez. It just shows how much more work there is to do for women, in a world built by men.”

What excites you about the future?

“We've never been as advanced, and we've never been as diverse. It excites me that progress has been made, but we can always do better.”

And what frustrates you?

“Media owners still have restrictive policies and still ban ads that show what is normal, especially when it comes to women's health. They're so disconnected from the real world. We fight one ban, and three new ones pop up. It frustrates me that even if we've opened up the conversation, there is still so much to do. Once you dive into the feminine care category, you find taboos and stereotypes, the deeper you dig, the more you uncover. For me, Covid showed how deeply rooted that is, because vaccinations have impacted women’s cycles, but in vaccination trials, women weren't asked about which part of the cycle they were in. Those kinds of side effects should be reported like all other side effects."