Now Andrex Is Getting Comfortable in Culture, It Can ‘Roll with It’
To mark Oasis’ homecoming reunion, Andrex and FCB London, in partnership with Global Street Art and Bowel Cancer UK, have painted a mural in Manchester’s Lever Street encouraging fans to track their poo.
Appearing at a site specifically chosen to target fans queuing for the Heaton Park shuttle bus, the mural, dubbed ‘Roll with It’, encourages fans – who are largely part of the 35-54 demographic that rarely or never look at their poo – to take a look back and keep an eye out for signs of bowel cancer.
“Our strategy from the beginning has been used to turn toilet humour on its head,” chief strategy officer Ben Jaffé told LBB. “So rather use it as a means to mask something, use it as a means to confront something.
“Arguably the most confrontational front man around right now is Liam Gallagher. The people that are most in need of this message are British people. If you drill down into the subset segment of British people that need the most, it's actually, sadly, middle-aged men, because we are so dismissive of things. That is the target group who most need it. So it felt like a very timely point for Andrex to get a very important message across but in a way that was disarming and spoke to the people who need it the most. That's where our right to play was.”
Beyond that, FCB London and Andrex have laid the strategic groundwork, since ‘Get Comfortable’ which launched in March 2024, for creativity like this to emerge with confidence.
“When you have confidence in who you are, you then know how to act in any given situation. You know what your kind of natural response would be,” said Ben. An inspiration for the CSO is Quentin Crisp, the eccentric and raconteur about whom Sting wrote ‘Englishman in New York’. He said: “You first have to find who you are, then you have to be it like mad.”
“That's such a good mantra for anyone, but particularly brands,” reflected Ben. “Find your voice, find where you have a right to play – be unashamedly you and don't deviate.
“What we've done with Andrex is we are playing a role in culture which is playing very much to British qualities,” he continued. “Given the subject matter that we're dealing with – shit, poo, excrement, crap, faeces, dropping the kids off at the pool, whatever, all the euphemisms and jokes that surround the act of going to the toilet. We have just a funny relationship in general with going to the toilet.
“It's both funny ‘haha’ – we're the world heavyweight champions of innuendo and toilet humour, no one does it better than Britain. But it's also funny, strange – it's used as a way of masking our ineptitude to deal with something that is actually very natural, to the point that sometimes it can be incredibly detrimental to our overall health. There's a fundamental, strong message that we need to get out there: you need to get comfortable with this stuff, because it actually could save your life. If you look beyond the 'you've got to roll with it' message, one in four Brits won't look at their poo, even though it's a free daily barometer of your health.”
Niamh Finan, UK and Ireland marketing director at Kimberly-Clark said: “Getting comfortable with what’s normal for you is vital when it comes to spotting the signs of bowel cancer. So, when it comes to tracking your poo — just roll with it, look back, and track.”
Kyle Harman-Turner, ECD and creative partner at FCB London added: "Men aged 35-54 in particular don’t track their poo, which is a lot of Oasis fans. But with Liam and Noel sharing out the mural to their four million Instagram followers, we hope this encourages fans to look back and track their poo, helping to prevent 16,800 Brits dying of bowel cancer every year. You gotta roll with it r’kid".
The mural is part of a three-year partnership between Andrex and Bowel Cancer UK, which has included several initiatives such as bowel cancer symptoms being featured on the back of over 100 million packs of Andrex toilet tissue a year.
