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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to ON Strategy Showcase. I'm Fergus o' Carroll in Chicago. I hope you guys had a great week last week. I mentioned on the last episode that I was in New York City for the final round judging for the US Effie Awards. The actual Fes Award Gala is happening in May here for the US and I was able to sit in the judging rooms and listen to the strategists, creatives and clients debating the cases that they were judging and rating. And I got to tell you, it was like a phenomenal experience. I mentioned to the folks at Effie's while I was there that we've got to figure out a way to bottle that dynamic and bring it into the show. So we're going to try to do that once the awards have been announced at the May Gala in New York City. So look for that. I just thought it was a phenomenal experience to hear different perspectives on the work, what people liked, the insights that people noticed within the insights. I mean it was really an incredible experience and one that I1 I know our listeners are going to love. So we're going to do our best to bring as close to that as possible to the show, hopefully starting over the summer months. So excited about that. If you're in the UK and you are thinking about Effie's the FE entries are open in the UK now for the 2026 awards. The first deadline is May 5th and I know a lot of times people think FES are very expensive to enter. If you enter early, you save a lot of money on your entries. So if you can get in before May 5, you save a lot of money. The final judging deadline or entry deadline, sorry, is June 16th. So you've got time to make it happen. And if you're out there and maybe you haven't actually entered the FES in the past and you think that the AFIS are just for major ad campaigns. They are not that you can actually enter any marketing initiative that demonstrates real world effectiveness. It could be a packaging design, it could be a distribution strategy, it could be a website or an app. It doesn't have to be a holistic, full, traditional sort of ad campaign. So check out fe.org I believe if you enter that in the UK, you'll go to the UK webpage effie.org there's also workshops that EFFIE virtual workshops that the EFFIE organization offers for those people who are maybe first time entries into the fes and you want to get tips on how to do it, how to make it easier and you can get all of that information@fe.org or you can send an email to feuk feukfe.org and the guys over there are terrific. They'll take care of it for you. So we hope to see you later in the year at the UK gala, which I think is going to be in November again. So I look forward to that. We had a great experience last year when we went there. Now, speaking of the prior year, we are talking today about Neurofen, which was the grand Effie winner at the UK Awards last year for their Gender Pain Gap campaign. This is a fantastic case. I love the thinking behind is for those who don't know, Neurofen is kind of similar to IBM ibuprofen product here in the US So it's in a very competitive category. It's in a lot of. It's in a category that is, I think about 40% of that category is private label. So it's really getting hurt on price. And Nurofen is the premium brand in the category, sometimes three to five times the cost of those generics. And it had to figure out And I think McCann has done a phenomenal job of figuring out how to turn around that decline in the category in terms of share and maintain its price premium while gaining new customers. So it's a great case study. McCann in London got Agency of the Year from the Yafis last year they got a bunch of awards and it was great to see that happen. We're gonna be talking today with their CEO for McCann London is Mal Arrow. She is former Chief Strategy officer in that office and talking with Joss Majors who is a great voice in strategy. I think she's amongst some of the best out and she is a strategy partner at McCann. So this is Neurofan. Great case study. If you are watching us on YouTube you will be able to see the creative work that'll be dropped into this episode. You can go to our website if you're not watching us on YouTube and you'll see it there. And if you are listening to us on a podcast platform, please give us a five star rating if you like the show. Even if you don't like the show, as the Buckleys on their great podcast in the UK say, even if you don't like our show, still give us a five star rating. If you haven't heard the Buckleys, you got to go check that out. By the way. So this is Neurafen. Enjoy. So let's talk about one thing up front, Mal, because I'm sort of fascinated by it, I don't know. Many people outside of the UK know that you were once Chief Strategy Officer of McCann London and then rose to Chief Executive Officer. I don't see that much. How did that come about for you? And briefly, how did that come about for you and did it feel like a completely different role?
- [05:45]
B
Well, you say that it's not that prevalent, but actually, I feel like the more you lift away layers in the industry, the more stories you see of strategists becoming more broader leaders. My first boss in strategy became a CEO. Our current global CEO was a strategist as well. But, yes, it is still a bit of an anomaly. It does feel like a really different role in many ways. It's a much kind of broader perspective on an agency, how it works, lots of different clients as a whole kind of organism and how we kind of service them. And it's really thrilling and amazing to see how the agency all kind of fits together. But I think there are some things that make it a more similar role than you would think. I think it's about kind of clarity and communication. I think it's about simplifying the complex. All of those kind of hard strategy skills are really valuable for leaders. So I actually think that, obviously I'm incredibly biased, but I think that strategists make great leaders. And especially at a CSO level, you already have great client relationships. You already know how to advise kind of top clients on what they should do. Now there's just a broader platform and a broader kind of remit for that.
- [07:09]
A
Yeah. Well, congratulations. And what a year for McCann to come out as Agency of the Year for the effies, the year where you were in control. So I think strategists will just take complete credit for that.
- [07:22]
B
Yes, exactly. Yes. Yeah. I think it was an amazing endorsement of all the work. Work that we've been doing at McCann to win Fe's agency of the Year across a number of different clients as well. But, yes, to have our strategic capabilities recognized so highly is amazing.
- [07:45]
A
So, speaking of strategic capabilities, Jos, great to have you back. And let's kick off with letting people know here in the US and those around the world who don't know, tell us what Neurofan is and whom it competes against.
- [08:01]
C
Yeah. So Nuofen is an interesting one. It's a pain relief brand and the case that won the Effies was based in the UK and it's one of the leading pain relief brands in the uk, but it actually has a really interesting history. So when I Joined the account. Nurofen was first discovered as ibuprofen in back in the 1960s. And there was a doctor called Dr. Stuart Adam who was actually trying to look for an arthritis cure, so was investigating anti inflammatory properties, which is what makes ibuprofen unique, and stumbled across ibuprofen when he had a massive hangover and realized it cured his hangover before he went to do a big speech in front of people. And that's how ibuprofen was discovered in the first place. But Nurofen was the brand that first popularized ibuprofen, first brought it to the British public. So back in the 1960s, it's really been a leader within the industry, but particularly within pain relief. But looking at the category since then, the category has become quite a complex and quite a fragmented category to try and work in. So it's a category that is now full of all sorts of different molecules, from ibuprofen to paracetamol to codeine, all sorts of different formats. So if you look in people's handbags, their kitchen cabinets, they'll all have pain relief in there, but lots will have medicated creams and gels as well. And people are constantly switching between those different formats. So for Nurofen, the landscape has been one that has got a lot bigger, a lot more complex since we've started working in it. And the biggest player that we are always pushing against is own brand as well, which wins about 60% of the share of the categories. So having to justify your price premium when people are really steered towards own brand is a big challenge that we faced at the beginning of this project too.
- [09:56]
A
And so from a price point of view, where did Neurofen stand?
- [10:01]
C
So Neurofen is one of the most premium brands in the category. So depending what market you work in, and we work across Nurofen globally, it's anywhere from three times the price of own brand to in some cases, five times the price of own brand as well. And the backdrop for this brief and where it came about was rooted in trying to justify our price premium at a time where around in 2016, there was a whole host of news articles that came out. We had Martin Lewis, who's an expert on money saving in the uk, coming out and telling people that the core product was the same as own brand. The BBC was running documentaries, the Guardian was running documentaries. So to try and prove that you are worth paying more and people should be paying up to five times the amount in that context, when the news and the popular media is against you was a really tough starting point to try and turn a brand around.
- [10:58]
A
So, Mel, how did the brand initially respond to this message of five times more expensive or generics being five times less expensive? I mean, how does the brand initially respond to that?
- [11:12]
B
To double down on all of the category tropes? So the brand is a fantastic innovator. So coming out with lots of new kind of formulas, liquid capsules, it's always relied on its innovation to stay ahead of the category. But also the sort of table stakes of the category is speed. So Neurofem were always trying to stay the most kind of fast and effective. So really playing to all of the kind of rules that had been established in the category, but stay ahead of those rules.
- [11:48]
A
So then, Joss, at what point is there a realization that you guys need to go in a different direction? Because it's not an easy decision to make, that you need to make a notable significant shift?
- [12:05]
C
I mean, the shift was a complete step change for Nurofen when we came to make it. And just as Mel said, this was a category obsessed by speed, but it's also really hard to turn away from the thing that made you the category leader in the first place. So Nuofen strength was. Was built from years of saying we're faster than everyone else to the point where it was so part of the brand DNA that their flagship product is called Nuofen Express, and they once briefed us on a speedboat to come up with the next brief around speed. So it was literally, literally on the speedboat.
- [12:40]
A
We.
- [12:41]
C
We have been on a speedboat to brief, which was still one of my favorite briefings I've. I've ever had. It was a lot of fun. But to turn away from that when it's brought success in the past took such a bold mindset and a willingness to do something different and to tackle this as something that wasn't business as usual from the agency and the client holding hands that it was a tough ask at the beginning, but when the client came to us originally, the brief from them was our category share. And our value sales have been in decline for over five years. And that's in spite of when we dug into the data, still being seen as the brand who was faster than everyone else. So it was very clear that the thing that had brought success wasn't working for us anymore. So the thing that really pivoted us in the first place was Nuofen is a brand with a huge wealth of data behind it. And we really dug into the category drivers of Consideration, so saw very quickly that we were still winning on speed. But the one area where we were really underperforming on was empathy. And Neurofram was a brand that was seen to not understand people's pain and understand the emotional side of people's pain. So it was that point where we really pivoted to how did that question
- [14:02]
A
get into the questionnaire? Was it a theory that you guys had?
- [14:06]
C
It was a theory that we originally had. And the theory came from diving into System one, System two thinking. So we'd always focused on the more rational, surface level reasons for why people buy pain relief. And the hypothesis we had was, if you're going to go out and ask people why they buy pain relief, they're going to give you an obvious answer, which is, it's because it works quickly, it's because it's more effective. But when we thought about it, and it was more from thinking about our personal experiences, we figured, you know, when we experience pain, it's not something you can rationalize, it's something that is deeply personal, it's something that is deeply emotional. It's incredibly subjective and we all experience it differently. So why should the category drivers be rational and System two? So we commissioned a really big piece of research alongside Nurofen to dig into those more unconscious, intuitive, implicit drivers of consideration. So we set out to prove a hypothesis and it absolutely emerged that leaning into empathy and leaning into understanding was a huge gap that not just Nurofen, but no one in the category had really lent into before as an incredibly
- [15:19]
B
sort of rational organization. I think Neurofen needed to see the proof of that pivot in order to follow it. So whilst it started as a hypothesis, it was really important that we were able to research and deliver the data to show that emotion was really sitting behind people's decision to purchase. So at every stage of this story, there is a rational proof at the heart of every decision, including when we actually leap into execution and the campaign and the work, we were really closely monitoring whether it was working, whether it was turning the brand around in order to justify it. So I really love this interplay between going after emotion, but it's still backed up with really rational kind of scientific proof.
- [16:09]
A
Yeah. So, Joss, when you look at consumption, how does it split by gender in terms of frequency of consuming? And then we can talk about buying.
- [16:22]
C
That was a really interesting point for us because this brief was never intended as a brief to reach women in the first place. This was a brief that was about shifting perceptions of neurofen and proving that we understood people's pain at an emotional level that we, we'd never communicated before. And when we looked at why our sales had been going down for so many years, we did see that 60% of the category of are women. So there's a few reasons for that. Women experience more pain and more types of pain more often than men. Yes, women are often the people who are buying pain relief for the rest of the family, for their kids, for their partners, the ones who have it in their bags to offer to friends when they're at work as well. So they are the biggest share of the category. And after communicating in a very rational and actually quite masculine tone, when we asked consumers how they felt about the brand, we realized that we'd been alienating women. And women were far less likely to buy Nurofen than they were to buy other brands within the category. So it wasn't the driving force behind the brief. But in the process of digging into the data, we did realize there was a huge opportunity not just to reconnect with the pain category at large, but to pull back the audience who were most valuable as well. Which, which is women.
- [17:49]
A
Was empathy a category challenge or was it just a Neurofen challenge?
- [17:54]
C
I would say it was a category challenge. It was something that no brand in the category, which is wild when you think about it, that pain is so incredibly emotional and we have such an emotional and personal connection to it. And 70% of people, when we looked at the data, don't feel like brands understand their pain. So it's a huge empathy gap from the wider category. But when we looked at Neurofen specifically, because they had communicated so heavily, were almost the most, the more extreme brand within the category as well. So we did an exercise where we asked people to describe what their perceptions of Nurofen were and created a, an AI image to bring to life all the ways people saw it. And what we ended up with was a very good looking, sharp suited man in a silver business suit surrounded by lots of drinks, drinking at his own in a bar. So that was the perception we needed to shift of this slightly aloof, detached character who was very good at what they were doing, but didn't really have that sense of connection and empathy to people around them.
- [19:00]
A
So I'm super curious about that. So how do you end up with a male? Is it that it was that the category messages with a male voiceover, that, that, that it's a more direct message? I mean, what, what's your theory? Either one of you on why it would be perceived as a. A man versus a woman or. I mean, it just seems that it's very starkly male. Yeah.
- [19:24]
C
And I think it comes from a lot of biases. So I think inevitably, when you're communicating about speed more than anything else, a lot of the trappings and the metaphors and the tropes that you use to communicate speed are inherently quite male biased. It's things like ads from previous years had been set on speedboats, probably because of the briefing, being in race cars and going around racetracks. So I think inadvertently, by trying to communicate speed over multiple years, we'd fallen into a lot of very male tropes, male metaphors, and a male language for talking about fast and effective, which over time had just created this perception that this was a brand for men.
- [20:09]
A
So I had the Effy team on this Week with Andrew Tindall. We were talking about the Creative Dividend Report. And one of the things that came out of that report was the fact that it struck me, which was every campaign drives sales, but sales isn't enough. And so it comes down to this issue of price. So your goal was to maintain price, I would suspect five times, though. I mean, was there a lot of conversation around, will this pivot really help us sustain? And then what is the emotional connection you're creating in a woman's mind that makes her willing to pay three, four, five times more?
- [20:53]
C
It's a huge challenge. And we had questions and skepticism throughout the entire journey about whether this would be enough to justify the price premium in people's minds. What we did know was that in tandem to all of sale, all Nurofen sales slowly declining over five years, the brand metrics that justify that price premium. So the belief this is a brand that's suitable for my pain, it's a brand for me, it's a brand I trust had all been declining alongside that. So we believe that if we could rebuild that sense of trust, rebuild the right associations with the brand, but also prove that the brand had a bigger role in people's lives beyond just pain relief. And there was value in a brand that was giving back to people's lives and tackling pain issues within broader society, then that would help us to begin to justify that price premium as well, particularly given a lot of that price premium is driven by the incredible amount of innovation and research that Nurofen is doing behind the scenes, not just in their products, but also research that benefits the wider medical industry as well.
- [22:05]
A
So now there's these two issues. There's affordability. And then there's this issue of purpose. So let me ask you this, do you think of this as a purpose led brand? And then in economic times, because this is in 20, 24, 25, affordability was a big issue. Did you feel like super comfortable with, as Joss is saying, this sort of leap being possible?
- [22:37]
B
Well, to answer the first question about whether we see Nurofen as a purpose driven brand, we do now, is really the answer to that. I think that they have always had a purpose in people's lives which is to treat pain quickly. But now I think that we have really positioned them as a leader in pain and all kinds of pain and going deeper into the emotional drivers of pain and, and how it turns up in society and how it affects every single aspect of people's lives. So whilst there has always been a relatively functional purpose there, I think we have unleashed that into genuine pain leadership. And I think purpose in advertising, it's become a kind of stigmatized word because there was definitely a period of brands stating their purpose and going after purpose without got kind of legitimate reasons for doing so. But you are a brand that innovates to help people. You always have a legitimate purpose. I think we have now just given that a greater platform, greater meaning and really kind of unleashed it in, in lots of different ways. So in answer to your question, Neurofen has really embraced the idea of being a purpose driven brand internally in terms of how employees see themselves all the way through to marketing and advertising. And then the second question about affordability, look, as Joss said, this was a brand in decline. We knew that what had been working in the past wasn't working anymore. So we needed to do something different. There was stiff competition and also incredible headwinds, not just in terms of affordability, but a global pandemic that had demonized ibuprofen. So much bad press. So we had to do something pretty radical. And the research that we did gave us the confidence that actually this was a more emotional category than we believed it was and people could be persuaded to purchase on the basis of kind of their emotional drivers. And as I said at the start, this wasn't just a leap of faith. It was really incredibly calculated. So it was research first pulling out the truth, pulling out the insight, putting it into action, but then measuring every step of the way. Because we launched the new platform as a test to see whether it would work and it worked pretty quickly. And then we built on that, those learnings.
- [25:11]
A
So it was, you did it as a regional pilot it wasn't a national test, it was a. When we say test, obviously sometimes people aren't really sure what that means. So you went into just certain parts of the UK or Europe.
- [25:23]
C
Yeah. So this began as an econometric test model and we took three regions across the UK with a control region. And then what we wanted to do is test our previous speed focused communications against our new See My Pain Purpose communications to tackle the gender pain gap. And the thing that really surprised us was that the semipain communications were five times more effective at driving short term sales than the previous speed focus communications. So we set out to build a long term brand platform that could drive sales in the longer term. But the short term impact of that was way beyond what we'd expected it to be as well. So that as a stepping stone, gave us a really strong foundation to prove to the business that this was the right way forward and that this was going to be the thing that was going to turn the brand around.
- [26:16]
A
So in those tests where you talk about the various mixes, were you looking at layers of communication? Were you sensing that just doing TV for example, versus using other tactical approaches were making a significant contribution? Or was it just control market and then one test with one mix media mix?
- [26:42]
C
So I'll separate out the two points because for the control test itself, that was about testing it on one media mix only. So we looked at video formats just so we could isolate all the other factors and make sure it was the messaging we were testing and that the media mix wasn't playing into one campaign being more effective than the other. But when we then took it a step further and rolled it out nationally, something we were really committed to from the beginning was that this was not a traditional communications campaign. This was about shifting a brand from talking to people about how quick they were and about product benefits to a brand that could fight bias at a societal and structural level. And to do that, we had to rethink completely what that media mix and channel mix was going to be. So way before we even considered going out to the general public. This was about getting in GP surgeries with training programs around gender, gender bias. It was about creating behavioral tools that we could put in people's phones so they could have better conversations in their very squeezed GP appointments, where they often felt like they were being rushed out the door and more subject to gender biases. It was about creating experiences that we could bring women who had experienced pain dismissals together with media personalities and gps so that they could have really positive, productive conversations about the Gender pain gap. And it was only then that we started to move into more traditional channels like tv, social media and beyond as well. So we completely rethought about what our rollout plan was and how we were going to take this to first the medical system, but then more wider society at large.
- [28:27]
A
So, Mel, what is the gender pain gap that you've created here, that you've leveraged or you've designed around?
- [28:34]
B
So I think the phrase the gender pain gap is one of the strongest elements of this campaign. Being able to name something that people can't quite put their finger on in society but know is real. We didn't come up with the phrase. We found it in literature, but we gave it fame and gave it a platform. So in the same way that there is a gender pay gap, the gender pain gap is the difference between men and women's pain and how it's acknowledged in society. So women's pain is often overlooked or dismissed, or women are outright gaslit by medical professionals. And that is because the perception is that women are often overreacting or over exaggerating their pain as a result. That means that their pain is dismissed in lots of ways.
- [29:27]
A
Obviously, that was concluded by men. I mean, isn't it ridiculous to think that women are thought to have made up their pain? I mean, come on, it's just nuts.
- [29:38]
B
The thing, the wild thing about this is that if you have a conversation with any woman in your life about this, they will have experienced it. Every single one of us on the team could tell a story of having their pain dismissed. I was booked in for surgery and I was sort of lying on the hospital bed when the anaesthetist came in to see me and talk to me about the procedure. And he told me about it. And then at the end he said, you know, after the operation, you won't be able to just lie down like a princess. You'll have to get up and move around. That's the kind of thing that happens on a daily basis, medical situations. It is just pure. And I was in agony lying on this bed, ready for surgery.
- [30:27]
A
So that's about more than bias. That's about more than pain bias.
- [30:31]
C
It comes, though, I think, from centuries of being told that women are more dramatic, more emotional, and that's exactly what women are hearing. It's when we spoke to women and we went out and spoke to hundreds of real women about their experiences, the things that they were most commonly told was, it's all in your head. You're being emotional, you're being dramatic. You're making it up. It's just a period. Why are you complaining about it? And as we started this process, we realized these weren't isolated incidents. This is something that one in two women in the UK have felt. Their pain has been dismissed. But we'd also seen that take off in culture at the same time that we were diving into this project. And you see stories like Serena Williams, who knows her body better than anyone else, she's a professional athlete, and when she was giving birth, they didn't want to give her pain relief because they didn't believe that she was in as much pain as she said she was in. And she nearly died as a result of that. So even at the top of their game, with athletes and people who know themselves and know their pain, there's still this perception that they're exaggerating and they're trying to make more of it or be more emotional than the pain deserves. So it's a mind blowing field once you dive in.
- [31:47]
A
So once you go through the test markets, do you learn things in that test market that resulted in you kind of fine tuning or reshaping some of the creative executions, or did you. Is what you went through to market with what you ultimately went nationally with?
- [32:04]
C
The biggest pivot, I would say, is throughout this campaign, it's been a really fine line to walk in terms of tone, because it's an issue that when you talk to women, there's really deep seated anger and frustration about the way that you're treated by doctors who don't intend to treat you that way. But they have their own issues that they're facing. They're taught on books which focus on men's pain. They are in an overwhelmed health system themselves. So trying to acknowledge the frustration and the anger of women.
- [32:41]
A
Frustration is also, I would guess, Joss, it's also not just against the medical community, but it's against employers, it's against friends and neighbors and people that you come across in everyday life. Right. It's societal more than than 100%.
- [32:56]
C
And I think one of the quotes that stuck with me, we were doing one of our events where we created a popup pharmacy and I was talking to a pharmacist and he looked at one of the quotes that was written on the wall, which was, you're just being emotional. And the moment for him was not that he said that to one of his patients. He turned around and said, I've actually said that to my wife. And it was that moment that he'd said it to someone in his life that that made him completely rethink his own biases. So it's very much something that is rooted in wider society. But we were also really conscious that if we went too bold and too punchy with the messaging, we had the risk of angering healthcare professionals as well. And this campaign had to bring healthcare professionals along with us as allies if we really wanted to create the change that we wanted to make as well. So the biggest thing that we wanted to learn from testing is what is the right tone and what is the right way to create the change and the impact at the scale. We need acknowledge the frustrations of women, but do so in a way that doesn't feel like it's pointing the finger at doctors who, especially in the uk, are in a really challenging position themselves.
- [34:05]
A
Interesting. So is there an example that you can recall from how you ultimately achieved that right balance and tone? Was there a certain thing that needed to be tweaked, A certain message that needed to be included?
- [34:19]
C
The key thing for us was making sure it felt really rooted in real women's experiences and voices. So the creative device that we ended up using was creating these fake dismissal packs, where rather than the pain relief that you would normally get, you received one of the most common pain dismissals instead. So you get a pain pack which would say you're being emotional. And I think it becomes very difficult
- [34:44]
A
to argue when you say a pain pack, what do you mean by that?
- [34:49]
C
So the boxes that you get pain relief pills in, normally we use those as the creative vehicle and we print real women's pain dismissals on them.
- [35:00]
A
And that gave us as a device for creative executions, or was it actually in store?
- [35:06]
C
So we used it as a device just for creative execution. But what we did then was that fake dismissal pack would appear in our TV ads, in our social campaigns. We also created a fake pop up pharmacy where we would have shelves and shelves of these dismissal packs. So it felt like you are walking into a normal pharmacy. But rather than ibuprofen and paracetamol, you were given products that said, it's all in your head, you're being emotional. So exactly like women are made to feel when they go into a gps, when they go into a pharmacy, this
- [35:42]
B
pain was like you were being tortured
- [35:48]
C
over 50 years of living with pain
- [35:52]
B
to just put up and, you know, carry on, which at the time I couldn't.
- [35:57]
C
My friends sort of got on with
- [35:59]
B
their lives and thought, natasha will be okay.
- [36:01]
C
I was told it was just wear and tear. That was it, wear and tear. Why don't you go to bed then
- [36:08]
B
if you're in pain? Well, maybe it's just stress.
- [36:10]
C
You start to believe when they say that there's nothing medically wrong. Yeah, nothing wrong with you. It's like this energy of dismissal.
- [36:19]
B
Like, I think if I'd have been
- [36:22]
C
told your pain's real, it has saved my mental health. I don't think for one minute if a man was sitting in my position, they would say, you're just being emotional.
- [36:30]
A
Mr. Smith, tell me about that film, its role, and then let's talk about what's happened since then. Because this film ran, I believe, in 2024. 25.
- [36:43]
C
Yeah. So this campaign launched in 2023 and it's continued to run every year after. And that original film was really about creating a platform for women's experiences. So it was about reflecting back the scale of this issue in society, that one in two women's pain had been dismissed, giving a platform to let women who had experienced pain dismissals themselves share their own dismissal experiences in their own voices. We didn't want this to be a brand out piece of communication. We wanted it to feel really grassroots, like we were hearing from the women who had been invisible in society and had gone unheard from for so long. So that was our central awareness piece to really sort of create awareness in wider society about this issue that has gone on. But building on that, we wanted to use that as a springboard to move out beyond traditional channels as well. So we've continued to build on that using the same creative device for the two years following. So things like, like taking that dismissal pack and putting a giant dismissal pack on the streets of Newcastle so that people walk past it and get confronted by the kind of dismissals women experience when they are walking down the street in their everyday lives. So that was about taking it into places and spaces in culture that felt unexpected but could spark anger and frustration and awareness at a much bigger scale and with the earned media that that TV campaign alone couldn't.
- [38:20]
A
So the big question, I think for many marketers and for strategists listening here is going to be how long before you could see the impact beginning to happen? And is it true that creative executions with consistency show cumulative positive effects over time? In other words, have you been able to see an upward trajectory in terms of retention and margin management or premium maintaining that premium pricing?
- [38:53]
C
So we fully launched the campaign in 2023 and it was always intended to be a long term commitment for a couple of reasons. One, because this was about long term Brand building. But secondly, because this is an issue rooted in centuries of gender bias and we were never going to drive change overnight at a societal level. So it was a commitment that hand in hand, McCann and Nurofen agreed to make for the next 10 and beyond. But in the first year after the campaign, we saw metrics begin to shift a little bit. Not to the point where we completely turned everything around, but we did see a halt in the decline, which was really positive. That's what we wanted to see. We wanted to see that versions category,
- [39:37]
A
the category continues to decline and you guys did not. Or was it categorically that the metrics began to stabilize?
- [39:44]
C
Do you feel it was Nurofen that began to stabilize? Because we saw that other brands continued to lose out to own brand. So the trajectory in the category before the campaign had been their own brand. Own brand products had been for years stealing share from branded products. And this was the first year where we begin to began to see that Nufen was actually winning back share not just from other brands in the category, but from own brand as well. So we began to see that really positive shift fairly early on. And we actually saw brand metrics spike much earlier than we saw sales begin to increase. So to see brand trust increase and to see that Nuofem was starting to be seen as a brand that understood people's pain happened quite early on. But we didn't really see the big shift in sales until year two and year three of the campaign. And three years in, we've seen a 15% increase in value sales, which after five years of decline is the. A monumental increase. So over the long term, it's beginning to have a huge effect and payback at a scale I think we'd really hoped for, and it's fantastic to see it proved out.
- [40:55]
A
When we met in London, you received the Grand Effie Award. It was for that sort of first phase, or that first phase, year or two of the campaign. What has happened since then? Have you been able to stay the course creatively? Have you needed to evolve it? Have you felt that you've needed to fill in some gaps, that you've been able to recognize what is happening now in phase two?
- [41:24]
C
So there's two parts to this. The first is we've continued to build on the original work that was done with a lot of consistency and we've built on it both behind the scenes. So continuing to invest in research into women's pain, into partnering with universities, with healthcare providers. We've also tried to make more of some of the assets we have. So as part of the campaign we created something called the Pain Pass, which is a behavior change tool for women and doctors to have better conversations in the GP appointments. But we've looked at partnering up, for example with the NHS to get that into the NHS app, so it's much more readily accessible to women for free all across the country. So behind the scenes there's a lot of work that's continued to be done in terms of the communications out to the public. We've continued to stretch how that idea lives in culture. So looking at how we partner on social media to take those giant pack activations and create much more socially native content where people are reacting and responding to it online, generating more community led conversation around the gender pain gaming gap. We've looked at continuing to create spaces for conversation, whether that be the pop up pharmacies or health conferences across the uk. And we've also looked at really pushing into policy as well. So Reckitt went to the EU Parliament to try and fight for more recognition and advocate for women's pain as well. So we've continued to build on the first phase of the campaign in that way way. We've also got a really exciting new chapter coming up at the end of March, which I can't talk about too much, but it's rooted in the insight that when you just tell people women's pain is being dismissed, sometimes everyone is subject to all the biases that women talk about. The next phase of the campaign is about making people really feel it. So we've created a social experiment, started to gamify things where before people even know what the topic is, we put them in women's shoes. We make them feel the emotions, the anger and the frustration that women feel and only then give the surprise reveal that this is the issue that has caused all of this. So it feels much more immersive. It's continuing to build on all the brilliant work and the themes that we've had before, but it stretches it into a new, a new level. I think that heightens all of those emotions.
- [43:58]
A
So, Mal, when we were in London, you also joined us at Mother, where we had that roundtable discussion and that was the night before the Effie. So we're gonna do that again next year. It was fun. But there was one thing that you pointed out, which you did brilliantly. We were all talking about these independent agencies, these smaller boutiques that were doing sort of leading edge creative work and you stepped in, and rightfully so. Now I couldn't say anything because I was on full edit from the Effies because I knew what was gonna happen the next night, but I couldn't say it. You basically came in and said, hey, listen, don't dumb down on the networks. They're doing some of the best work out there. And you were right. Tell us about that.
- [44:47]
B
Yeah, I mean, look, this isn't. This definitely is not an anti independent agency message. I love, love mother. I love the independence in the UK market. I think that makes for a really thriving market. But there definitely is a bit of a narrative at the moment speaking of bias. Speaking of bias, that the best work comes out of independent agencies. And I think that's because there's been a lot going on with network agencies. That's been a bit of a sort of industry distraction. But I'm really glad that we're here talking about a fantastic platform and fantastic work that's been incredibly effective for a client in a network agency. Because I do believe and know it's not that I believe I see it day to day, but there are incredibly talented people in network agencies making incredible work. And that night at the fes, even though you knew what was going to happen and I didn't know what was going to happen, was in a fantastic endorsement of that. So we were Effie's agency of the year. We won for. For Xbox, we won for Neurofem, we won for the electoral commission. We were nominated for Jammie Dodgers. That's biscuits, voting, pain relief and gaming. That couldn't be.
- [45:57]
A
Didn't you get Dettol also?
- [45:58]
B
Oh, and Dettol. And Dettol, the wonderful Dettol. Which is, yeah, germ removal. I mean, you couldn't have a more kind of diverse spread of cases. All fantastic work and all working really, really hard for the clients behind them. So, yeah, I'm glad I got on my soapbox and said my feed.
- [46:18]
A
Yeah, me too. It is Mel Arrow, CEO of Macann in London, and Joss Major, a strategy partner at McCann. Thank you both for your time. This was a really enjoyable conversation and all the best moving forward with this great brand. It's just becoming terrific. Thanks a lot.
- [46:38]
C
Thank you. Thank you.
- [46:40]
A
And we'll see everyone on the next episode.