THE BRIEF

According to WASH United, Waggs and Unicef, 1 in 4 women worldwide has no access to period products, clean water and adequate wash facilities. They live unseen, struggling with period poverty in underprivileged communities. Due to cultural and social stigmas, awareness of this critical issue is low. Freedom Cups, a social enterprise that produces reusable menstrual products, wants to spark discussions and drive sustainable action by getting people to empathise with those trapped in period poverty. The brief was to get people to feel the implications of period poverty and invite them to help alleviate the issue through Freedom Cups' buy-1 give-1 model.

CREATIVE SOLUTION

Building on the insight that newspapers were used by disadvantaged communities as a desperate alternative to pads, we created a series of three long-form copy press ads. Each tells the story of a young girl growing up in period poverty, forced to use a page like the one in the reader’s hands to manage her bleed.

With each ad at around 2,000 words long, we kept readers consistently engaged by crafting our stories with a raw intimacy that is also brutally honest. The design is intentionally restrained; crafting each story around the shape of a pad that simply wasn’t there, accentuated with a subtle bleed effect to emphasise the aching absence of resources and possibilities. As the pad shape differs for each story, every single line is also crafted meticulously to ensure that such a long piece could be comfortably read.

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