Tackling one societal taboo is delicate. Addressing two taboos compounded into one another is far trickier. The healthcare agency Havas Lynx recently did just that, tasked with creating a messaging campaign for the health device company MysteryVibe, around the power of using sexual pleasure to alleviate the often painful symptoms of menopause. Female sexual pleasure and masturbation are already stigmatized, as is menopause. Put them together in a campaign, and you’ve got a double dose of candor in a male-dominated culture that would rather the conversation be whispered in private.
But Havas Lynx met the challenge head-on, taking on the project pro bono because they believed so wholeheartedly in the importance of the MysteryVibe message. In doing so, Havas Lynx developed an eye-catching, thought-provoking, and conversation-starting OOH “Happy Menopause” campaign in New York City this past March, during Women’s History Month. Among other elements, the campaign featured a massive billboard in Manhattan depicting MysteryVibe’s Crescendo 2 device, designed to treat menopause-induced arousal, pain, and dryness. This historic ad marked the first-ever US billboard to feature a sex toy.
To learn more about the development of this provocative campaign, I recently chatted with Robyn Wagner and Ludmila Crowther of Havas Lynx. Wagner led on the project, and elaborated on the progression of the campaign’s messaging and what’s next. Our conversation is below, edited lightly for clarity and length.
How did the Happy Menopause campaign develop? What was the jumping-off point?
RW: The client was looking for support with getting the message out there about his product— not just being a vibrator, like everything else is on the market, but the fact that it’s been FDA approved, and it’s actually able to be purchased from your HSA (Health Savings Account) and FSA (Flexible Spending Account). So he was looking to us to do a scrappy campaign to support him across the US and UK markets.
As we delved into it, we came across Joyce Harper, who is a professor of reproductive health at the UCL (University College London) who’s been doing a lot of her own research in menopause and sexual wellness and how the two are very closely linked in terms of orgasms, masturbation, and sexual pleasure. When you have menopause symptoms like vaginal dryness, it’s kind of a daunting thing to even want to do those things, but actually, her research is showing that if you do, it will get much easier and almost relieve the symptoms that you’re going through from a menopause perspective.
So we thought that Joyce would be a really good fit in terms of being able to get more of that credible, professor side to the messaging. She was very keen to have a bit of a platform to get her messages told and to make sure that that narrative is coming through. Still, it’s such a big stigma in society, both menopause and sexual wellness, so the two together are a huge stigma.
What was that initial campaign roll-out like?
RW: The first part of the campaign was Joyce giving some bite-sized information in videos that MysteryVibe posted on their website and on social media. We had a little out-of-home campaign that went with that in New York, initially, that talked about, “over and over again,” in terms of orgasms and that using this product will help. It was less product-focused and was more about getting that message out. Then, we were able to do a second push with a different out-of-home campaign that had the stopping power that we wanted.
Can you elaborate on that second push of the campaign? How was that messaging different from the first iteration?
RW: It had the stopping power that we wanted, but it only worked in the US. We tried it in the UK with the product on the billboard with the word “orgasm”, and we were completely shot down, of course, because of the advertising standards in the UK. In the US, it was slightly different, so we were quite scrappily looking at how we could get this campaign out, and how we could get the message that an “orgasm comes with a medical prescription,” that was the whole point. We had “happy menopause” on it, and also that it was FSA and HSA accepted; those were the key messages.
We were able to find a media outlet that had individual billboards that were owned by different landlords, so they had fewer of the restrictions that perhaps some of the bigger media corporations have. We found a billboard where the landlord would accept the message, and it happened to be one of the biggest in Manhattan. So it worked out really well for us to be able to put that up and actually start to gain some traction and start to get some earned media.
MysteryVibe has its clientele already, but we wanted to get more people to understand the messaging of masturbation as medicine for women who are going through pre-, peri-, and post-menopause; it’s an amazing and very easy thing that people can do to relieve all of these symptoms. So having this billboard was a real chance for us to get that message out for people to see, share organically, and build that traction.
This campaign was a pro bono project for you all at Havas Lynx. Why is doing mission-driven work like this important to you all as a company? What is the selection process like for your pro bono work?
LC: It’s a mixed bag in terms of how many pro bono projects we do, where they come from, and how much we invest in each, but there are so many opportunities out there. As long as we hit our core goal, which is having an impact in the health space that’s actually going to matter and make a difference, then, as a team and as a business, we can choose to invest in what we can.
Our agency does something called a “Hatchling Day” every year, where everyone splits into mini teams for a whole day, and we get a challenge that we have to think of a unique and creative way to solve. There’s a vetting code to make sure the ideas are all sound for the business, then voting goes out through social media. We see who engages with it on social media to determine if this is an idea that’s viable and worth investing in. Is this something that we think we can take forward and really make it into something powerful for the healthcare community?
Another project that Robyn’s heading up with our strategists is in the mental health space around ADHD, and that was very much a personal-driven piece. We created a brief, we invested time in it, and now we’re progressing it into a little bit of a pilot study, and hopefully, it’ll turn into something bigger.
Working in the healthcare industry specifically must pose a rich blend of being challenging to address issues that are so personal, sensitive, and even controversial, but also deeply rewarding knowing the sort of impact you can have on people’s well-being.
RW: It’s brilliant. Our team in New York specializes in patient and consumer wellness, so obviously, MysteryVibe is more consumer-focused, but in the other work, we’re doing a lot of disease education for patients, and trying to be untraditional so that it cuts through.
In the US, in particular, there are huge product ads for patients that are like, “Buy this product! Here are the side effects!” But we want to support patients in making a more empowered choice that’s not product-focused, and actually educating them on their condition and the things that might help them. We’re not saying, “Get this product,”— we want it to be unbranded and focused on being empowered and informed so that they can go to their doctor and drive that conversation to actually get something that’s going to work best for them.
It’s super rewarding because we’re able to do communication and marketing, but it feels like everything we do is for good. That’s why I absolutely love the work that we do.
Can you speak more on how an out of home campaign is particularly powerful when addressing taboo subject matter?
RW: From an advertising perspective, there’s a real push still for out-of-home being a really good choice. If what you want to achieve is stopping power, that really is the greatest space to do it.
From our perspective, we thought that OOH would be able to generate more of that earned media and push the message out when we didn’t have a huge media budget. How are we going to make sure that this gets the earned media it deserves? How is that then going to push the message to the people who need to see it? So that’s really why we looked at doing this one billboard.
Gabe, the creative director, and I went down one afternoon once the billboard had been put up—it was huge! It’s like, 40 feet wide—and we stood there for no more than half an hour, and I would say there was not one person who didn’t walk past and do a double take or do some sort of look. There were people looking at the QR codes too. It wasn’t necessarily always the demographic we were looking for, but I don’t think that matters. Sometimes allies, like husbands, look at it and go to their wives and say, “I saw this, did you know about this?” It was really cool for us to see that level of footfall and the level of engagement that we actually got in just half an hour. It’s not something you can replicate as easily with digital because you’re fighting so much all the time there. Whereas the street that we were on, there was nothing else. There’s no other billboard for a while, so it really is the first and only thing you see for a few minutes, which is a great thing.
Seeing the reaction of people walking past and just talking about it, even if they don’t do anything with the call to action or the QR code, but if they’re talking about it, that’s the aim. We want people to have this conversation more fluidly and to not feel like there’s a stigma. So from an objectives perspective, it definitely did that in terms of starting conversations.
What was it like on the creative side of the campaign trying to strike that tonal balance of bringing levity to what some might consider awkward subject matter, while not wanting to delegitimize the important health ramifications of the topic?
RW: You can see the progression in tone between the first and second campaigns. In the first set of out-of-home ads, we said, “A menopause prescription you’d be happy to take over and over again.” That was a play on words with the “orgasm” and the way that we did the font. But our creative director really wanted to do something that was more punchy and an immediate read. That’s why the second billboard came out with, “Orgasm now comes with a medical prescription.” There’s no doubt, it’s right there, you can see it. Credit to the client for allowing us to push with that. A lot of clients would have been hesitant to have gone so bold with orgasm and the product right there.
What’s next for Havas Lynx and MysteryVibe? Will there be a phase three of the Happy Menopause campaign?
RW: We want to keep pushing. Right now, we’re hoping to push more on the menopause message because we think there’s still more to do and we want to ride this wave and build more traction as much as we can. We want to do another campaign related to this with another out-of-home piece, so we’re going to be aligning with Soumyadip, probably early next year, on a new brief to see if we can push further.
Something else we’re working on with him is for the Ocean Awards; it’s a big competition in the UK where you can submit an idea, and if it wins, you can then make the ads and get the free media from them. We’ve submitted something focused on a different product he has, the Tenuto 2, which is an ED vibrator. So it’s a very different angle, but something that we also think is an important topic that’s stigmatized and not talked about. We saw an opportunity to do a similar approach with a big out-of-home campaign to support men with erectile dysfunction. It’s a competition, so we don’t know if we’ll be able to create it, but hopefully, that will be something else we can do within this space