Bodyform and Libresse, selling into a category that had used blue liquid to depict blood for fifty years, simply put red blood on screen and won the highest earned-media share in its category

the problem

Period-product ads never showed real blood, only blue liquid

background

what everyone would do

Keep following the category's fifty-year-old blue-liquid convention like every other competitor, since it was industry standard and nobody had ever been penalized for following it. It guaranteed the ad would blend into a category where every brand looked and sounded the same, competing purely on production quality and media spend rather than on ever saying anything different.

what they saw

Bodyform saw that the blue-liquid convention wasn't a rule at all, it was an unwritten habit every competitor honored purely out of precedent, with no regulation, safety reason, or evidence behind it. Because nobody had ever actually tested what happened if a brand simply stopped following it, being the first to break a convention nobody was actually required to follow meant claiming attention no incremental improvement within the existing convention could ever generate.

the move

AMV BBDO's #BloodNormal film for Bodyform/Libresse replaced the fifty-year-old industry-standard blue demonstration liquid with red liquid to depict real period blood, and paired it with unguarded scenes of ordinary period-related life that ads in the category had never shown, explicitly targeting the unwritten broadcast-and-brand convention itself rather than any product feature.

why it works

Because every brand in the category had followed the same unwritten blue-liquid convention for decades, showing real red liquid on screen was instantly, visibly different from everything else in the category — a distinction that required no new product feature, only the decision to depict reality instead of an inherited euphemism. Since the convention was habit rather than policy, there was no actual barrier stopping Bodyform from breaking it, only the assumption that nobody would be first; being first converted a zero-cost creative decision into roughly £3.2 million in earned media and press coverage across more than 30 countries, disproportionate to the campaign's paid spend precisely because the novelty itself, not the advertising budget, generated the attention.

the payoff

The campaign generated an estimated £3.2 million in earned media on a comparatively small paid spend, sparked debate and press coverage in more than 30 countries, and drove Bodyform/Libresse to the highest share of social voice in its category that year. It won the Glass Lion: Grand Prix for Change at Cannes Lions 2018. Follow-up brand tracking cited by trade press reported roughly 60% of people who recalled the ad had a better opinion of the brand — figures that are agency-reported effectiveness claims rather than independently audited sales data, so should be read as directional, not audited financials.

where it breaks

The approach only works when the convention being broken is genuinely arbitrary rather than protecting something real — a habit masking an actual safety, legal, or evidentiary reason for existing would expose the brand to real harm or backlash rather than praise for honesty. It also depends on being first: once a convention has already been broken by a competitor, the same move loses its disproportionate attention value and becomes simply catching up to a new category norm rather than an act of genuine risk. And it requires the brand to be willing to absorb any backlash from parts of the audience who preferred the old convention, since breaking a widely honored norm invites exactly the controversy that generates the earned-media effect in the first place — the payoff and the risk come from the same source.

what came after

The campaign is widely credited with ending the blue-liquid convention across the category — competitors moved toward red or more realistic depictions in subsequent years — and Bodyform/Libresse followed it with further taboo-breaking work (Wombstories, 2021) that won further Cannes recognition, building an ongoing brand platform out of being first to break category silence.

references

1. [1]Libresse's Blood Normal Takes Glass: Lions Grand Prix at CannesAd Age, 2018adage.com
2. [2]Bodyform and Libresse 'Blood normal' by AMV BBDOCampaign, 2017campaignlive.com

keep it

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