Always Like a Girl advert reviewed: the film that made femvertising

A documentary director asks grown women to run like a girl and they mince, flap and giggle. She asks ten-year-olds the same question and they sprint. That gap, filmed in a fake casting session, is the whole argument of Always “Like a Girl”, released on 26 June 2014 and still the most cited piece of purpose advertising ever made.

Our take: a genuinely well-built film with a demonstrable attitudinal effect, and a commercial case that has never been shown with the same rigour as the sentiment.

Credits

• Client: Always, Procter & Gamble
• Agency: Leo Burnett (Chicago, Toronto and London)
• Chief creative officer: Judy John
• Creative directors: Judy John and Becky Swanson
• Copywriters: AJ Hassan and Angel Capobianco
• Art directors: Hmi Hmi Gibbs and Nick Bygraves
• Director: Lauren Greenfield
• Production company: Chelsea Pictures
• Editor: Kathryn Hempel, Cutters
• PR: MSLGroup
• Media agency: Starcom
• Launched: 26 June 2014, with a 60 second cut in Super Bowl XLIX on 1 February 2015

The problem: nobody shares a pad advert

Always led the femcare category worldwide for years on product performance, and then the performance gap closed. Competitors started talking to young women emotionally and on social platforms, and Always lost relevance with 16 to 24 year olds. That matters more here than in most categories, because once a woman settles on a femcare brand she tends to stay with it. Losing a cohort at entry means losing it for a decade.

Confidence had always been the brand’s territory, but expressed functionally: trust the product, feel confident during your period. The agency’s own case study for Campaign is candid that this logic was exactly what younger women were rejecting. A pad cannot fix self-esteem, and pretending otherwise reads as insulting.

So the team went looking for evidence and found it. A study commissioned with Research Now established that girls suffer their steepest drop in confidence at puberty, around their first period, and that more than half of women surveyed reported it. The campaign’s Institute for Public Relations case record shows that research was not decoration: it set the strategy, the target of 13 to 34 year old women, and the launch measurement targets of two million views and 250 million media impressions.

The idea: find the enemy inside the language

The creative leap is small and very good. If gender stereotyping is what knocks confidence out of girls at puberty, then the stereotype is already sitting in a phrase everyone uses without thinking. “Like a girl” is the enemy, it is free to attack, and it belongs to nobody. Always could take it without buying it.

Turning that into a film required a device rather than a script. The team staged a casting call and simply asked participants to run, fight and throw “like a girl”, which meant the argument would be made by the subjects rather than by a voiceover. It is a social experiment format, and its persuasive power comes from the fact that the viewer watches the proof happen. There is no product in it at all.

The craft: a documentarian, and sixteen hours of rushes

Hiring Lauren Greenfield was the decision that made the format work. Greenfield is a documentary photographer and film maker whose subject is precisely how women and girls learn to perform femininity, and she directs the participants without leading them. The film runs three minutes and nineteen seconds, which in 2014 was a deliberate bet that people would watch a long thing if it was worth watching.

The editing is where the craft actually lives. The Drum’s account of the making notes the team spent sixteen hours reviewing footage to select the contributors who ended up on screen. Kathryn Hempel’s cut withholds the young girls until the adults have fully committed to the stereotype, so the reversal lands as a shock rather than a lesson. The single best moment is unscripted: a girl asked what running like a girl means to her says it means run as fast as you can.

The credits, as published on Ads of the World, list Judy John and Becky Swanson as creative directors, with AJ Hassan and Angel Capobianco writing and Hmi Hmi Gibbs and Nick Bygraves art directing, produced through Chelsea Pictures. It is a large team for a film with no set, no cast and no script.

The results: enormous reach, softer commercial proof

The scale is not in dispute. Leo Burnett reports the film passed 90 million views and more than a million shares, with over 1,100 earned placements and 4.4 billion media impressions in the first three months. Always’ Twitter following tripled in that period and its YouTube subscriber base grew by 4,339%. The Institute for Public Relations record puts the global figure at 4.5 billion impressions across markets including the US, UK, France, China, Germany, Brazil, Mexico and Turkey.

The attitudinal shift is the part worth taking seriously. In a study conducted in December 2014, almost 70% of women and 60% of men said the video had changed their perception of the phrase “like a girl”. Brand research after the campaign found 81% of women aged 16 to 24 supported Always in reclaiming the phrase. Claimed purchase intent among the target grew by more than 50%, with a higher than average lift in brand preference.

Note what is absent. There is no published, independently judged sales or share paper of the kind Snickers lodged with the IPA. Purchase intent and brand preference are respectable leading indicators, but they are supplied by the advertiser and they are not volume. On our effectiveness criterion that is the difference between a strong score and a very high one.

The Super Bowl, and the awards

P&G cut the film to sixty seconds for Super Bowl XLIX on 1 February 2015, making Always the first feminine care brand to advertise in the game. It is a genuinely brave media buy: the audience is the least sympathetic imaginable for the subject, which is exactly why it worked as a statement. The brand ran a live activation around the game with the 15 year old quarterback Karlie Harman.

The trophy haul is close to unmatched. The campaign took the PR Lions Grand Prix at Cannes in 2015, entered by MSLGroup with Leo Burnett, plus a Gold in PR, a Gold and a Bronze in Media, and a Glass Lion in the award’s inaugural year, where the Glass Grand Prix went instead to BBDO India’s “Touch the Pickle”. It then won the 2015 Emmy for Outstanding Commercial at the Creative Arts Emmys, joining, as Adweek recorded at the time, a Grand Clio, a D&AD Black Pencil and White Pencil, and eleven Webbys.

The criticism it deserves

“Like a Girl” is the campaign that made femvertising a category, and it took the category’s criticism first. Writing in The Daily Beast on 30 June 2014, four days after launch, Emily Shire argued the film demonstrates a real problem beautifully and then implies a manufacturer of panty liners can solve it. Her sharper point is that Always never mentions menstruation, the actual subject of its product and the actual source of a great deal of teenage shame.

Shire also asked what Always was doing beyond the film, and that question has aged into the standard test for purpose work. The academic version of the complaint is commodity feminism: political ideas stripped of politics and used to sell. Neither critique disputes that the film moved attitudes. Both ask whether moving attitudes about a phrase is the same as helping the girls in it.

What to steal

• Pick an enemy that is free. A phrase in common use costs nothing to attack and cannot sue you.
• Build a device, not a script. A staged casting session makes the audience watch the proof rather than hear the claim.
• Hire a documentarian when the performance has to be real, and budget the edit accordingly.
• Commission the research before the idea, so the insight can be cited by journalists rather than only asserted by you.
• Answer the “what are you actually doing” question at launch, because it will be asked within the week.

The verdict

Idea and craft are close to the top of the range: the enemy is well chosen, the device is elegant, and Greenfield and Hempel make three minutes of casting footage feel inevitable. Bravery is real, given a Super Bowl slot for a femcare brand with no product on screen. Effectiveness is where it slips, because the published evidence is attitudinal and advertiser-supplied rather than audited sales, and legs are shorter than the fame suggests, since the follow-ups never landed with the same force. It sits high in our ranking of the best campaigns as the piece that defined a decade of brand purpose, and as the piece that inherited every argument about it.