Despite its status as a first world country, 1 in 10 girls in the UK can’t afford sanitary products and are forced to improvise with everyday items like socks, loo roll or even newspaper. The related shame, isolation and discomfort they feel means that up to 65% describe not being able to concentrate in school with some missing school all together. This is period poverty, in the UK, and it’s unacceptable.

Enter Hey Girls: a social enterprise launched in January 2018 to help raise awareness and provide sanitary products to these girls in the UK. They operate a ‘buy one give one’ model, so for every box of sanitary products bought, one is donated. They wanted to raise awareness about the issue and increase donations.

We created ‘The Pad Ad’: the first ever newspaper advert which could also be used as a sanitary pad. It ran as a double-sided full page in the Metro newspaper. The first side could be cut out and ‘used’ as a sanitary pad, in a simple iconic design intended to make readers pause as they flicked through the paper. When turned, the reverse side revealed the shocking fact. Every commuter received one in their morning Metro.

The idea to use newspaper as a medium to convey this message was as critical as the design itself. It was a literal representation of what real UK girls are going through, to bring home to our audience that this is 1 in 10 girls’ reality every month.

The PR strategy is very simple. We wanted a way to make everyone experience what these girls are going through for real, in a shocking ‘stop-in-your-tracks’ way. It is exactly this that was intended to generate talkability.

Overall, we wanted a way to disrupt everyday routines to bring Hey Girls and their mission to end the taboo of period poverty into public awareness. In doing so we wanted to reveal Hey Girls as the clear, tangible solution.

‘The Pad Ad’ was the first ever newspaper advert which could also be used as a sanitary pad. It ran as a double sided full page. The first side could be cut out and ‘used’ as a sanitary pad, in a simple iconic design intended to make readers pause as they flicked through the paper. When turned, the reverse side revealed the shocking fact. Every commuter received one in their morning Metro.

By using a newspaper ad to demonstrate the period poverty girls are experiencing in the UK, we really caught commuters’ attention. In the month after the print ad ran, Hey Girls experienced a 400% increase in website traffic and an 83% sales increase. Supermarket sales continue to grow with both Asda and Waitrose placing repeat orders and increasing their product ranges. Hey Girls have now donated over 2.3 million menstrual products. Most importantly, Scottish government subsequently ruled that menstrual products would be provided free in all schools, with Hey Girls as their major provider. Not bad for a newspaper ad.