We knew making an ad in sombre tones about the symptoms of vaginal thrush was not going to cut-it with media-savvy, mobile-obsessed young females.

Canesten has a 40-year heritage in the thrush treatment category and although non-prescription they can ONLY be obtained upon the consultation of a pharmacist.

Canesten was increasingly at the mercy of pharmacists recommending pharmacy-owned and low-price generic treatments instead of Canesten.

We had to make Canesten SYNONYMOUS with thrush and get women to RECALL and ask for the brand BY NAME.

If you can’t talk about it, sing about it!

That was the central idea behind Thrush: The Musical, a blockbuster comedic jaunt about a common vaginal infection many women are WAY too embarrassed to admit having or treating.

Through a ridiculously catchy tune, the girls reassure passengers that there’s:

''…No reason for it to be taboo

Yeah, it’s just a case of thrush in your Coochie coo!

…See it’s only vaginal Candidiasis

Not some life changing existential crisis!''

Allowing SketchSHE to produce the content in their tone and comedic delivery was crucial to the campaign being authentic and credible.

From Poonanie to Vajayjay, the girls melodiously take the viewer on a journey through vagina euphemisms, taking the STING – literally - out of the STIGMA of thrush.

Women share a lot of things. But when it comes to issues ‘down there’, they’re all too silent.

Despite 75% of women suffering from thrush at some point in their lives, they don’t like to talk about it with their friends - let alone with a pharmacist; many of whom are male.

Our insight was that women would NEVER share a traditional ad about thrush (would you really want your friends to think you had it?)

But creating SHAREABILITY was crucial for getting in front of this audience.

Our strategy was therefore, to use humour to open the conversation about thrush and drive organic content sharing and discussion.

Enter SketchSHE - an Aussie comedy trio who’ve amassed 161 million views on their YouTube channel with their lip-syncing comedy videos.

Working very closely with Bayer, their extremely stringent legal and medical compliance requirements and with NO creative agency involvement and a small budget, we commissioned SketchShe to create a 2-minute music video which women could watch, engage with and talk about, aimed at removing the stigma from the condition and making them smile!

The content was posted by the girls on SketchSHE’s social channels - Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram - to leverage their passionate audience and drive further conversation and sharing.

We created a 15-second and 6-second cutdown of the content which we programmatically targeted to our audience across TrueView on YouTube and Facebook.

These versions also drove further traffic back to the long-form version on YouTube and encouraged people to share.

Finally, to drive PR, we created and distributed a special SketchSHE Airlines VIP amenity kit which we sent to handpicked Australian influencers and key journalists.

Our key objective was to get young Australian women to recall the Canesten brand, so the next time they spoke with a pharmacist they knew what to ask for.

Incredibly, we saw Ad recall increase by +52.2% overall and a massive +86.5% across our core female 25-34yr target audience. Brand Awareness lifted by +22.9% across our target audience.

The video itself also generated some impressive metrics; it had nearly 13 million views and achieved 21,065 likes, shares and comments. Crucially for the brand, these results culminated in + 14% sales increase of Canesten thrush cream treatments YOY (April 2018 vs. April 2017).

Despite being aimed at the Australian market, the content has been shared by people all over the world. Best of all people appreciated Canesten’s bravery in shaking up the category:

‘’It really made me think thrush wasn't something to be ashamed of. Seriously great job!’’