Behind the Scenes of Cannes Winner 'Womb Stories' and Its Masterful Framing of Womanhood

Opinion: The campaign won major prizes at various festivals this year

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When me and my creative partner Nadja Lossgott were given the brief by Libresse and Bodyform to push against the taboos and stigmas that continue to hold women back when it comes to the intimate details of their health, we were also told to keep it simple. This time around, we dove deeper under women’s skin and intimately embraced the experiences they endure even more holistically.  

When we thought about the creative response, which would follow on from the previous work of “Blood Normal” and “Viva la Vulva,” we got to thinking about how periods aren’t operated with a switch. There are a million different experiences and emotions that are attached to each of them, none of which are the same.  

The one unifying principle was the uterus.  

The data behind the concept

That felt like a second seat of power that ruled each woman in unimaginable ways – so we reimagined that. From shit biology textbook diagrams to a rich visual world with womb dwellers that sometimes worked with you and sometimes against you. Then we went back into research with an ambitious listening project and used this metaphorical tool to uncover a goldmine of storytelling data.  

Of course, you shouldn’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to and with our listening project the answers we were getting were dealing with very raw subjects of loss and severe pain and we were weaving this together with quite charged subjects.  

To honor these responses, we found ourselves asking our clients Tanja, Martina, Luciana and 22 different markets to let go of basic advertising dogma – stay away from any dark stuff and keep it simple. But we have been on a long journey together built on trust and we research our work.  

It was that research that, at first glance, made all of us push back against ourselves. There seemed to be quite high negatives in the results. But when we looked into them what we realized was the research was failing to deal with the complexity. The results were lumping emotions like sadness and pain into negative buckets when in fact what was happening was catharsis, and it was actually a hugely positive reaction, albeit a very complex one. This was mirrored again with our social listening tools when the campaign was out in the world. We had to retrain the algorithm and teach it emotional complexity. 

Realizing the concept

To make this happen, the challenges we faced were complex as we tried to weave together a multitude of storylines, animation styles and live-action pieces into one coherent film. On top of that was the challenge of the raw subject matters we were trying to show.

To dive into this darkness, to bring the pain, pleasure, triumphs and tragedies to life truthfully and sensitively, we turned to a female crew and all-female animators. We wanted to make sure that every micro-decision and nuance was made with intuition and lived experience.  

We were only just finishing the work as the pandemic hit, which meant we delayed the launch until July. But even then, we worried that the news was being dominated by a single topic of conversation and our message would be drowned out.  

Libresse

The incredible response

The campaign has replaced the vicious spiral of shame and silence with a virtuous cycle of listening, expressing and helping. Our film gave people the bravery to share their own stories, which helped people recognize their own stories and their own pain.

This also led us to see how we could go further into systemic change with a pain dictionary for endometriosis sufferers. The dictionary that uses metaphorical and visual descriptions of pain from sufferers seeks to replace the outdated one through 10 pain scale.  

“Womb Stories” and “Pain Stories” is doing what art and creativity can do at their best: allowing people to reconsider their relationship to the world, allowing people to challenge what they have been taught, allowing them to heal and giving others hope. It gives hope that all the billions of different “Womb Stories” out there can be heard and believed, and by giving the narrative power back to women, the hope that this kind of creativity can be medicine. 

And the campaign continues to reach new marketing. It has now run across 30 countries, including Russia where hundreds of doctors recently took a workshop on the pain dictionary. The exponential potential of that is inspiring, with many more to be trained.

For the brand, the journey started many years ago. Stigmas and shame don’t just end. There is still so much to be done and undone.