<div class="gn-article"><div class="gn-hero gn-reveal"> <div class="gn-hero__image"><img src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/687a235da6861294eec73166/6acf69a85b961172761d7a21_blob-6ace0a57aa157953857610.png" alt=""></div> <div class="gn-hero__head"> <span class="gn-kicker"><span class="dot"></span>Expression</span> <h1 class="gn-title">Featured Case Study of the Week: Full Tilt | Bodyform</h1> <div class="gn-meta"> <strong>The GO Network</strong> <span class="pip"></span> <span>13 October 2026</span> <span class="pip"></span> <span>5 min read</span> </div> </div> </div> <div class="gn-body"> <p class="gn-lede gn-reveal">Bodyform, part of Essity's Libresse family, was a challenger up against P&amp;G and Kimberly-Clark in a mature, heavily regulated category where every brand used the same visual shorthand: blue liquid, pristine white outfits, careful euphemism. Broadcast rules in several markets actively discouraged anything more honest than that.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">Full Tilt's answer, built on a five-year relationship with the brand, was Blood Normal, the UK's first ad to show a real period: red liquid on a pad, blood on a leg, a man buying tampons without embarrassment. The audience was never just women. It was also the men, broadcasters and regulators whose assumptions had kept menstruation off screen in the first place.</p> <div class="gn-stats gn-reveal"> <div class="gn-stat"><span class="gn-stat__num">13.7</span><span class="gn-stat__label">Earned-media return on media investment, the strongest of the early Live Fearless campaigns.</span></div> <div class="gn-stat"><span class="gn-stat__num">43</span><span class="gn-stat__label">Markets adopting the platform by 2024, up from 6 in 2016.</span></div> <div class="gn-stat"><span class="gn-stat__num">&gt;€1bn</span><span class="gn-stat__label">Essity femcare revenue, grown from around €600m, climbing from #6 to #4 globally.</span></div> </div> <div class="gn-divider gn-reveal" aria-hidden="true"></div> <h2 class="gn-reveal">Why It's Featured: Scored Against Best Practice</h2> <p class="gn-reveal"><em>Service line tags.</em> 43 tagged against this case study, running from strategy and insight work through to platform-specific distribution. That range is doing real work: it tells a brand searching for research capability and a brand searching for social execution that the same team can be found under both.</p> <p class="gn-reveal"><em>Real expertise, not a label.</em> The standout evidence here is the insight programme underneath the creative: a ten-country tracker of over ten thousand women, built specifically to prove the shame this campaign addressed was universal rather than assumed.</p> <p class="gn-reveal"><em>A quantified result.</em> This case study does not lead with reach. It leads with an earned-media ROI figure, then backs it with something harder to fake: competitors changing their own category conventions years later.</p> <p class="gn-reveal"><em>Sector and category context.</em> The regulatory detail does the explaining here. Describing broadcast rules written to keep menstruation off screen tells an outsider exactly how stuck the category was, without needing the client name to do it.</p> <p class="gn-reveal"><em>Imagery.</em> The header image is the case study in miniature. Real red liquid, not the blue stand-in the category had used for decades. The visual choice and the strategic argument are the same decision.</p> <div class="gn-divider gn-reveal" aria-hidden="true"></div> <aside class="gn-quote gn-reveal"><q>A five-year client relationship and a platform that scaled from 6 markets to 43 is a different, stronger kind of proof than one strong quarter.</q><cite>The GO Network · Editorial</cite></aside> <h2 class="gn-reveal">What This Means for Your Own Case Studies</h2> <p class="gn-reveal">This case study earns its place for a different reason than most: it is evidence of a platform, not a single campaign. That changes what is worth borrowing from it.</p> <aside class="gn-callout gn-reveal"> <div class="gn-callout__label">What this means for you</div> <h4>Three things worth borrowing from this case study.</h4> <ul> <li><strong>Show duration, not just a moment.</strong> A five-year client relationship and a platform that scaled from 6 markets to 43 is a different, stronger kind of proof than one strong quarter.</li> <li><strong>Name your research, specifically.</strong> "Insight showed appetite for honesty" is forgettable. "A ten-country tracker of over ten thousand women" is not.</li> <li><strong>Report the outcome that is hardest to dismiss.</strong> A sales number can always be questioned. A broadcast ban being overturned, or a law changing, cannot.</li> </ul> </aside> <p class="gn-reveal">If you want your case study considered for a future feature, the full criteria sit on your member dashboard. A good place to start is checking whether your results section would still make sense to someone outside your category, that is usually the first thing to go missing.</p> <div class="gn-divider gn-reveal" aria-hidden="true"></div> <h2 class="gn-reveal">Background</h2> <p class="gn-reveal">Worked directly with Bodyform across Europe for 5 years.</p> <h2 class="gn-reveal">Target Audience</h2> <p class="gn-reveal">Women across the UK and wider Europe, from teens to mid-40s, with intersectional representation (age, body type, ethnicity, sexuality, disability).</p> <p class="gn-reveal">Behaviourally, they were navigating a culture of embarrassment and silence, in which period ads used euphemisms (blue liquid, women in white shorts) and avoided real-life experiences.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">Their needs were simple but unmet: to see periods depicted truthfully; to feel socially permitted to talk about them; and to have male partners, friends and gatekeepers (broadcasters, retailers, teachers) understand that periods are normal.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">A rolling insight programme (semiotics, lived-experience qual, and a 10-country "Taboo Tracker" of 10,000 women+) mapped the universality of shame and knowledge gaps, giving us a globally portable brief.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">We also defined two secondary audiences: men (normalising purchase/support behaviours) and media regulators, whose rules reinforced stigma by forbidding realistic depictions.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">This reframed the task from "sell pads" to "remove shame," so women could live more freely.</p> <h2 class="gn-reveal">Client Challenge</h2> <p class="gn-reveal">Essity's femcare brands (Bodyform/Libresse) were a challenger in a mature, over-regulated category dominated by P&amp;G and Kimberly-Clark.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">Product-led messages ("longer, thinner, more absorbent") lacked cut-through, while a decentralised, multi-name brand architecture diluted investment and consistency.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">The category's conventions, blue demo liquid, pristine white outfits, euphemisms, made femcare advertising low-interest and complicit in stigma. Broadcast rules in many markets explicitly or implicitly discouraged showing period blood, keeping the reality of menstruation out of mainstream culture.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">With less media firepower and rising product complexity, Essity needed a fame strategy that could outsmart, not outspend, one capable of shifting norms, earning disproportionate talkability, and uniting markets behind a single, purpose-led narrative.</p> <h2 class="gn-reveal">Agency Solution</h2> <p class="gn-reveal">Under the long-term "Live Fearless" platform, we created #BloodNormal: the UK's first ad to depict real menstrual blood and everyday period moments (a red liquid on a pad; blood running down a woman's leg; a man buying pads; a girl asking for a pad in public).</p> <p class="gn-reveal">The creative principle was "radical empathy", show periods as they are, not as the category wished them to be, so the work could act as a cultural springboard, not just a film. We designed distribution to maximise earned reach and regulatory pressure: launch online with PR, partner with culture titles and influencers, and challenge broadcasters' bans by presenting a paradigm of normality rather than shock. Craft choices (mixed media, human vignettes, confident copy: "Periods are normal. Showing them should be too.") were deliberate signals to regulators and society. By making truthful visuals unavoidable, the campaign invited media debate and opened a path to overturn outdated rules while giving women the representation they had asked for.</p> <h2 class="gn-reveal">Results</h2> <p class="gn-reveal">Fame &amp; norm-change: #BloodNormal earned widespread mainstream coverage and debate; broadcasters' bans were challenged and subsequently overturned in multiple countries, setting a precedent for the category. Competitors followed by adopting red liquid (Always in the US; Kotex in 2020), evidencing category shift.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">Measurable effectiveness: Blood Normal delivered an earned-media return on media investment of 13.7, the strongest of the early Live Fearless chapters.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">Platform impact: the taboo-breaking canon (with #BloodNormal as a pivotal chapter) helped Essity femcare grow from ~€600m to &gt;€1bn and climb from #6 to #4 globally as more markets adopted the work (6 in 2016 to 43 by 2024). It also contributed to overturning TV censorship in c.30 countries and changing four laws, while stigma metrics improved materially (e.g., fewer women hiding their periods).</p> <p class="gn-reveal">Independent coverage in Campaign and The Guardian recognised #BloodNormal as the UK's first depiction of real menstrual blood, catalysing the wider conversation.</p> </div></div>