PERSIL’s global research revealed there’s one stain people globally wanted help removing.

It’s a stain that’s universally experienced and universally shamed for half the world’s population.

Blood. Specifically, menstrual blood.

For PERSIL, it wasn’t enough to only help wash away these stains.

We needed to wash away the taboo along with it.

We did this by capturing images of real people bleeding, and telling the real stories behind these stains.

From the first period to the last, we have told beautiful, funny, moving stories that belong to our mothers, aunts, sisters, friends, neighbours, daughters, and our daughter’s daughters. They belong to all of us.

Let’s wash away the taboo. Dirt Is Good.

We chose the medium of letters as a way to tell the stories behind the period stains featured in our ads. We wanted to pair incredibly personal words with our highly cinematic and beautiful images.

Writing letters allowed us to share unique voices and honest portrayals of the experience of period blood stains.

To write our letters, we conducted interviews with menstruators of various backgrounds, ages and life experiences. From there we crafted the words into succinct letters that would attract readers in the OOH space. For all executions we wanted to ensure the letters were beautifully written but not copywritten to feel like an ad.

In this execution, it was important that our copy portrayed a theme we saw come up in our interviews countless times: the idea that a period stain sometimes represents relief. The language balances both humour and poignancy to match the image and depth of

We worked with a leading psychotherapist, specialising in shame, to help remove the stigma and taboo around periods stains and address concerns around one of the most stubborn stains that 50% of the world's population face every month, and ultimately help them to wash away not just the stain but the taboo.

As we were about to go live with the campaign, the poster contractor ClearChannel rejected our campaign in the UK over concerns about the content. Likewise, Meta classified images of menstruation as ‘fetish content’ and as such rejects any imagery that features such on their platforms.

To overcome these barriers, we took our case and findings to the ASA and CAP who ruled in our favour, stating that we were not breaking any rules and as a result, we were successful in flighting the campaign and starting to break down the taboos against this common but unspoken stain.