Our campaign sets out to capture the relationship between someone with IBS-D and their Irritable Bowel by literally giving their bowel a voice in the conversation. Her name is “Irritabelle” and she is your Irritable Bowel that always shows up at the wrong time. She’s frustrating and embarrassing (yet still funny and likeable). Irritabelle disrupts our Hero’s ability to live her life and say “yes” without hesitation; whether it’s making it to “ladies night”, or being on time to an important meeting at work.

The trouble is, IBS-D is not life threatening or considered a “serious” condition, so most sufferers won’t admit just how disruptive it can be. So we decided to show them by staging an Intervention. Only, we didn’t do an intervention on the sufferer. We did it on her gut, a.k.a, Irritabelle. By doing it this way, viewers could laugh while they learned.

We hired a group of improvisational actors to play the parts of our hero’s friends, family and co-workers. Then we staged an intervention to show the negative impact IBS-D can have on your daily life. While we provided the actors with a script, their improv instincts took over and helped drive a lot of the funnier moments. Since this was considered a piece of branded communication, we had to provide all of the necessary legal information. But even here, we had fun with it by placing the doctor within the intervention circle and having him step outside the scene to deliver his “boring” information.

The “A Gut You Can Live With” campaign just hit the market on April 3rd, 2016. It is too early to report meaningful business results.