In the UK, 1 in 5 mums experience post-natal depression and 7 in 10 were hiding the severity of what they were going through. Our culture had created toxic tropes & damaging stigmas that were affecting women’s well-being and preventing them from getting the help they needed.

With a long-standing purpose to ‘make the tough stuff women face a little lighter’ and a partnership with Comic Relief spanning over ten years, Maltesers and their maternal mental health charity partners set out to tackle this issue by bringing conversations out into the open.

By destigmatising the ‘taboo’ topic, Maltesers wanted to break the cycle of shame that surrounds maternal mental health. The campaign objectives were to increase the volume of conversations about maternal mental health and to encourage more women to seek support.

Millions of mothers suffer maternal mental health issues, but they suffer in silence.

Consumer research had shown that curated social media environments had perpetuated a one-dimensional image of motherhood perfection. This had left struggling new mums feeling alone, in the dark.

In fact, the social environment had become so pressurised that mums had been actively disparaged from ‘oversharing’ with the negative connotation of this term referring to those who dared to step outside the realms of a glossy edit.

So, Maltesers turned its attention to the environment that most needed to change and created a social campaign called #TheMassiveOvershare.

By flipping the concept of oversharing from negative to positive, we encouraged mums to share the difficult experiences of motherhood that were previously considered taboo.

The goal of the campaign was to generate a wave of shared experiences and conversations to support better detection and diagnosis of maternal mental health challenges.

With maternal mental health commonly hidden, undetected, or mis-diagnosed, we saw an opportunity to deliver on Maltesers purpose to ‘make the tough stuff women face a little lighter’.

Whilst a plethora of brands had supported other mental health initiatives, none had turned their attention to the specific experiences of mums.

As it stood, there was still an undeniable shame attached to maternal mental health that was preventing women from getting the help they needed.

Maltesers built its business by being a shareable treat amongst women and with maternal mental health, sharing is the best way to destigmatize the topic.

The biggest difference we could make was to encourage sharing to help remove the shame.

The approach was to destigmatize conversations about the real, less talked about experiences of motherhood, ensuring that both mums and those around them had a better understanding of the realities of maternal mental health.

An impactful launch put #TheMassiveOvershare out into the world on International Woman’s Day in March 2021 but we knew to have real impact, this campaign couldn’t be a ‘one and done’.

A sustained cadence of activity ran through to December with every touchpoint fuelling earned conversation around this important, previously taboo topic.

Maltesers began to normalise an open dialogue through a bespoke brand show in partnership with Channel 4, featuring some of the UK’s top female comedians who are also, importantly, mothers.

A new norm was set in the social sphere, with content from trusted influencers. Their deliberate ‘oversharing’ created a safe space for mums to also share their experiences.

Importantly, Maltesers ensured the realities of motherhood were unmissable for the wider population with mass reaching OOH, radio and TV.

Finally, every touchpoint connected mums through to a resource hub so they could easily access support.

With 388 million earned PR impressions and a 46% increase in social conversations around maternal mental health, #TheMassiveOvershare successfully delivered on its objective to drive conversations and destigmatise a previously taboo topic. These results were testament to the thought-provoking content, with 90% of the exposed audience saying that they intended to talk to someone about maternal mental health after watching.

Additionally, the campaign led to behaviour change with over 200,000 women actively seeking support through Maltesers resource hub, proving that Maltesers had genuinely reduced the shame which was preventing women from getting help for maternal mental health.

The campaign saw brand ‘esteem’ levels grow 70% with mums, 23% with women and 45% amongst the broader population and propelled sales too, achieving the highest rate of sale in 3 years and a 7.1% sales lift.

Overall, there was an ROI of £3.70