How do you successfully market a highly effective over-the-counter medication for flatulence with little budget, when no one wants to talk about such a taboo problem openly? That was our challenge for Bayer Lefax, which tasked us with making flatulence an acceptable on-line conversation topic and convincing young German adults that it’s okay to openly talk about flatulence. Our creative solution: Be completely daring and have a total gas with the topic: appealing to our target’s sense of humour about farting.

To achieve this in a very public fashion, we seized on the target audience’s admiration of celebrities and love for entertaining viral videos. We created our own animated 'Red Carpet Event', and produced a humorous cartoon video which parodied none other than the popular celebrity gala event when our most beloved entertainers are under the world’s microscope, and interrupted the show with an extreme farting moment. We strategically launched the video to coincide with the Bambi Awards in Germany. The video debuted under the title 'Mit Volldampf ins Showgeschäft' (Farting to Stardom), to convey the message that even famous celebrities can suffer from flatulence.

The cartoon was accompanied by another video starring a celebrity chef who gives tips on how to avoid such problems during an official or private red carpet moment with the right ingredients for the gala dinner.In just 8 weeks the campaign generated a strong up-tick in online conversation on flatulence among young adults and successfully brought a taboo topic into the public eye.

In March 2011 the initial idea was to produce a funny video with a German star comedian about flatulence on a red carpet. But after weeks of negotiations it became clear that no comedian wanted to see his name attached to flatulence. So we came up with the alternative solution of using animation to create a star-like cartoon character and parody one of the most memorable movie scenes throughout history: Marilyn Monroe, laughing as her skirt is blown up by the blast from a subway vent in 'The Seven Year Itch'.

For the cooking video, it was easier to find a willing celebrity chef because he could simply refer to flatulence by talking about food ingredients that often cause it. Both videos were launched in a 3 week window surrounding the German Bambi Awards in November 2011 to capitalise on the elevated frequency of online searches on celebrity topics during this period.

The social community responded favourably to our client’s bold approach. This is evident not only from the quantitative results from the campaign to date, but especially in the public discussion posts. In just 8 weeks, we have enhanced the brand awareness for this product and reached potential new and younger users:We reached approximately 2m consumers in our target group through Facebook premium ads (paid). The videos were popular on Facebook and Youtube, viewed over 32.000 times, and producing 1,531 'likes', 426 positive comments and 680 direct shares within just the first 60 days of release. On Twitter, numerous people discussed our bold approach in a positive way, making the cartoon one of the 'Most talked about YouTube Videos on Twitter', as reported by the blog 'Zoofs.com'. The cartoon was also named 'Creation of the Day' and 'Clip of the Week' by 2 of the leading PR magazines in Germany.