Dirt & Glory Tackles Stigma and Misinformation around the Morning after Pill and the Daily Contraceptive Pill
Despite society today holding largely sex positive views on the surface, when it comes to conversations about contraception (and specifically, the morning after pill), there’s still a lot of stigma and misinformation. So, how does a brand bring a product to market when its potential users are dealing with feelings of shame or hold false ideas about the product’s capabilities?
Those were the considerations HRA Pharma contended with in 2018, makers of ellaOne (the most effective morning after pill) and Hana (the first over-the-counter contraceptive pill in the UK), when Dirt & Glory Media, an editorial agency, won the account. Sophia Moss, editor, had just started at Dirt & Glory (D&G), fresh from an MA in magazine journalism, and saw the potential of what could be done with such an important yet sensitive subject. Sophia instantly recognised that a lot of myth-busting had to happen first to counter the stigma surrounding purchasing and taking emergency contraception alongside wider myths surrounding sex. D&G conducted research which found that 60% of young people didn’t actually know how the morning after pill worked.
This became the backbone of the communications strategy and it was expressed in many forms, like a branded forward-thinking and sex positive magazine where consumers could go to learn not only about emergeny contraception, but more about sex, relationships, and anatomy too. Tasked with a brief to educate people and make the ellaOne name synonymous with emergency contraception, Sophia and the creative team reached out to sexperts and, crucially, real people, to get their stories and perspectives about sex and contraception. The female-led team, which includes a team of writers, designers and social media creatives, launched the ‘My Morning After’ campaign which, to date, has received over 300 personal stories surrounding the experience of purchasing the morning after pill.
Working on both accounts has of course presented challenges. As both of the products are classified as Over the Counter (OTC) medications, every part of the communication is strictly vetted by the industry body, the PAGB (Proprietary Association of Great Britain), meaning the team had to be both compliant and creative. Nell Grecian, one of Dirt & Glory’s social media creatives, explains that D&G settled on a “big sister” voice on social media for approachability while maintaining the highest standard of medical accuracy.
Today, Sophia and Nell tell LBB how the team created a taboo-breaking and educational approach for ellaOne and Hana respectively, and how they navigated a tightly regulated space with creativity and flair to reach consumers with information that would educate and entertain.
LBB> What was the brief from the client like for ellaOne and Hana?
Sophia> I started at Dirt & Glory in September 2018, after they’d just won the ellaOne account and were in the process of creating the ‘My Morning After’ campaign and the digital activation of HRA Pharma’s above the line campaign. We wanted to create a sex positive, fun and informative brand which would empower women and people with uteruses to take charge of their reproductive health without shame. Breaking the stigma was a massive part of our early work, and continues to be today.
The conversation around the contraceptive pill is slightly different, so for the launch of Hana in 2021 we wanted it to be all about what works for you and helping you choose the right contraceptive choice for yourself. To play a proactive role in a large integrated-agency project during this landmark category switch was really interesting for us. Ultimately, our role was to really try and bring through an approachable, informative and, importantly, compliant tone of voice to Hana, in addition to visually bringing this brand to life in digital via our amazing design team. We were responsible for helping to launch and establish Hana as an innovative, exciting and accessible prescription-free contraceptive pill in the UK, but do so in the knowledge that the contraceptive pill in general might be easy to take, but that doesn't mean it is always ‘easy to swallow’.
Everyone's experiences can be different, and now that the GP consultation is no longer required for Hana we needed to firmly support the purchase process now that it was being completed by a pharmacist (either in a pharmacy or via Hana's e-commerce website, Hana Direct). This category first switch really underlines HRA Pharma’s commitment to helping women take their reproductive health into their own hands, so as an agency I think we really felt a responsibility to support them during this pioneering moment.
LBB> What was your initial response to both briefs?
Sophia> ellaOne has always been a great project to work on. I came straight out of an MA in magazine journalism, so the opportunity to help create a forward thinking, sex positive branded content magazine alongside a brilliant female creative team was a really exciting way to start my writing career. I’ve always felt passionately about questioning the stigma and double standards which still exist when we talk about sex, even in 2022, and it’s great to be able to talk openly about this very normal aspect of life and encourage others to do the same! I’ve also had the opportunity to interview sexperts and medical professionals and get my own questions answered.
Ultimately, the brief on the table was to make ellaOne synonymous with the morning after pill, create better education around, and increase knowledge of the morning after pill, and help to break the stigma of women feeling judged for purchasing the morning after pill. As a result, over the last few years, ellaOne has been an awesome opportunity to get involved in different projects and continue to hopefully empower people not to feel embarrassed when they’re making a choice about what happens to their own bodies. I know that there’s so many myths around emergency contraception - I didn’t know much about it when I first started, and definitely believed some of the misconceptions - and so it’s been a really educational and enlightening experience.
Hana was a really exciting chance to use my love of history to explore what it was like to be a woman or a person with a uterus in the ‘50s, ‘60s and beyond. I got to delve into ‘80s culture, discovered some great songs (She Bop is still on my Spotify playlist) and learned a lot about how the contraceptive pill helped shape our modern world.
LBB> What challenges did you foresee/encounter from the briefs? How did you overcome them?
Sophia> The ‘My Morning After’ campaign, where we encouraged people to come forward with their own first-person experiences about the morning after pill, felt unrealistic and unattainable at first and I was really sceptical about whether people would want to share such personal information with the brand. We were pleasantly surprised when we got about eight responses in the first day, and have now received over 300 personal stories about peoples’ experiences of purchasing the morning after pill. ellaOne made the strategic decision to build their campaign on a neutral platform for women to confide and share their personal taboo-breaking stories, which enabled us to creatively push content that women and people might need at that point of purchase. With more than 80,000 morning after pill-related Google searches each month, ellaOne also wanted to create a platform where people could access factually correct content to help demystify emergency contraception.
Hana was, and is, a landmark moment for the category, and for women and people with uteruses. One of the challenges was that we really needed to capture the sense of this occasion, and this giant leap in contraception access. We also had to do that in a heavily regulated market, where every single piece of our content had to go through a very thorough and detailed review, both with the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) and with the PAGB (Proprietary Association of Great Britain). Ensuring our content was both compliant but also consumer-facing and accessible, is definitely one of the big challenges with working with over-the-counter medications. It's a really collaborative process between our client, HRA Pharma, and the regulatory bodies involved.
Nell> When I joined Dirt & Glory, ellaOne and Hana were already well-established and long term clients. Hana had only recently become part of the portfolio, so even though I was a few months late to the party, I felt like I had part of the responsibility for building Hana as a brand online. We knew our content was going to be very regulated, and so our development of the brand’s voices had to be quite particular.
LBB> What were your main considerations when developing strategy?
Sophia> We’re always keen to keep learning, growing and adapting our strategy to the ever changing world. We always make sure we’re looking at the data, at what performs well and what doesn’t, what our audience is saying, any feedback we get and what’s happening in the wider world.
The #MyMorningAfter campaign was launched through feminist publication, Refinery29, a women-first publication with a core audience of 1.7 million women in the UK, and combined reach across social channels of 365,031. Strategically launching in a title that was native to our core target audience, it acted as the perfect catalyst to start the conversation, ignite further press coverage, and shine a light on the lingering taboo associated with the morning after pill. The consumer anxiety about purchasing the morning after pill really became the foundation for the #MyMorningAfter campaign idea. Using insights sourced at Reading, Leeds and Rise festivals from 863 women (18-35) during the summer of 2018, we wanted to deliver a social media campaign that resonated directly with those that it most affected. This data provided the foundations for our thinking behind the campaign and the real-life evidence we needed from ellaOne’s target market that helped frame the brand activities which ellaOne launched in September 2018 and which continues to this day. We are constantly updating our data with new research that reveals consumer concerns about contraception but more broadly with sex education too.
LBB> There’s still a lot of stigma attached to purchasing/taking the morning after pill. How did your strategy address the issue?
Sophia> Our ‘My Morning After’ campaign was designed to show that there is no one ‘type’ of person who takes the morning after pill. We wanted this campaign to show that anyone can experience contraceptive failure or have unprotected sex, and in terms of relationship status, where you are in your life, whether or not you have children and how rigorous you are about contraception, it really does vary so much. No one should be judged for making an informed decision about their own body. One thing I was also always clear on was that it was important for our campaigns to be inclusive of trans and non-binary people who may not identify as women and also have the ability to get pregnant. It’s so important that no one is excluded from the conversation. This is a challenging space to navigate online, and we definitely have learned a lot and still have a lot to learn.
Alongside encouraging people to help us break the stigma by sharing their own experiences and helping others feel less alone in the process, we’ve also been dedicated to spreading factual, medically backed information about how the morning after pill works, as we know there are so many myths about what it does and how it works which can further the stigma. By breaking the silence on one hand and spreading facts on the other, and through our sex positive feature articles, the My Morning After podcast, our A Letter To series and the sex index, we have worked to create an inclusive, informative and empowering space where people can learn and engage.
LBB> In 2020, you launched the Fact Not Fiction campaign - what was the thinking behind it and why did you feel this was the necessary next step for the ellaOne brand narrative?
Sophia> The ‘Fact Not Fiction’ campaign aims to combat myths and misconceptions around emergency hormonal contraception by providing medically backed sex education. In addition to breaking the stigma around emergency contraception, I think it’s really important to provide accurate information about how it works so people can feel confident and empowered in their knowledge. So many myths - from emergency contraception making you infertile (which isn’t true) to it being an abortion pill (also not true) can not only put people off accessing it when they may otherwise have wanted to take it, but it can also cause so much unnecessary anxiety if they do choose to take it. Our research revealed that almost 60% of young people don’t know how the morning after pill works, which was really the jumping off point for this campaign, which we launched exclusively in The Metro.
LBB> Do you think it was important to have women working on this project behind the scenes? Why?
Sophia> It’s so important for women and people with uteruses to have a leading voice in female health and contraceptive spaces, because no matter how talented a cis man may be, he doesn’t have a uterus and therefore does not have the experience necessary to understand what someone else may be going through. As women, we have experienced sexism and sexual shaming first hand and so we know what it’s like. I think having a variety of diverse perspectives and voices is crucial in being able to deliver your message in the right way. I really feel that our client values having an editorial team on their brands that are their target audience, because we have lived and breathed so many of the experiences that we are writing about.
LBB> Emergency contraception and the contraceptive pill are subjects that can be tricky to navigate in social media waters. How did you approach the strategy and control the narrative?
Nell> As I mentioned, our content was regulated from the get go - there are fairly extensive approval processes that any content we create - whether that be words, pictures, films or design - has to go through so we do have to be cautious with how things are worded and phrased but both brands needed a clear, relatable and approachable voice and I think D&G have built that. Creating content in a regulated space also requires considerable planning, because these approvals can take time. For example, if you’re looking to anchor your editorial or design around a particular cultural awareness day, those approval processes need to be carefully considered.
Sex positivity is becoming more and more popular online, but I’m sure you’ll agree that sex in general is still fairly taboo - it was important for us to find our place in this changing social-scape while still being on brand and sticking to the guidelines set to us by the regulators. We try and approach subjects like menstruation, libido, lube and sex education (to name a few) with a ‘big sister’ level of approachability but a clear medical background. Our work with Hana and ellaOne focuses on education and being on hand to answer questions and bridge any gaps that potential people might have when it comes to accessing their contraceptive options.
LBB> What was the best/most rewarding part of working on both of the campaigns?
Sophia> We’ve received several messages from people who found the My Morning After stories helpful, who after seeing our content felt less alone and empowered. It’s a real privilege to be able to help anyone feel more confident or less alone. I’m also really passionate about spreading sex positive, accurate and shame free sex education, and I’m so happy that we’ve been able to do that for the last four years with ellaOne and now almost for two years with Hana.
Nell> ellaOne and Hana are both brilliant brands to work on. They are paving the way for further change in the way contraception is discussed and portrayed online. Hana, in particular, has been part of such a monumental shift in the way women and people with uteruses can access their contraception of choice. Both brands just have a really empowering feel to them, and it’s great to get to be a part of their journey. We want to raise awareness of this new level of accessibility/sex positivity that both brands contribute to.
