Busting Gender Bias | Bodyform's #wombstories

For our inaugural Bust Bias post, we’re taking a look at Bodyform’s #wombstories — an ad that has been widely praised for it’s unfiltered approach to tackling stigmas around uniquely female issues.

Set to Pumarosa’s 2015 debut single “Priestess,” the ad tackles stories around pregnancy, miscarriage, menstruation, menopause, and a host of other issues. The pleasure, the pain, the love, the hate….if you haven’t seen the ad for yourself, have a quick watch now.

What is the bias?

The bias that this piece is attempting to bust is essentially a belief that female menstruation and reproductive issues are too difficult to talk about openly in advertising. Consumers need to see models in white underwear, blue liquid and stories that depict these issues as minor inconveniences that are easily thwarted with the right product.

The results, in a nutshell:

For women — bias busted! For men, we still have some work to do. While it would have been nice to see men to show a greater degree of empathy with the spot — after all, it’s not as if men don’t have mothers, grandmothers, sisters, etc. in their lives — this ad was obviously designed for women, so it achieved it’s primary goal.

The results, a deeper dive:

When Brainsights originally screened this ad in July 2020, the audience that donned our EEG brainwave readers was a group of 100 people pulled to represent the general population of the English Canada. Rather than looking at how the ad performed against the audience as a whole, we felt that it made more sense to see how responses varied based on gender.

Looking at Attention, Emotional Connection, and Encoding to Memory, the differences between the two groups was substantial. While women did show greater overall levels of Connection and Encoding, what was more interesting is how the story varied — in other words, how the mind processed the story differently for the two groups.

Male vs Female Persuasiveness response (Attention, Connection, Encoding combined) to Bodyform’s #wombstories

*Data interpolated to improve graph viewability

The results, a deeper dive (cont’d):

Looking at the overall persuasiveness of the spot for men vs women, there are some glaring differences. Looking at the key moments and scenes that resonated most strongly with each group, you could easily make the argument that men and women essentially watched different ads.

A somewhat cynical interpretation of the male viewing of this ad would look something like this: Woman is pregnant at obstetrician, man climbs on top of woman under sheets, girl in underwear checks herself out in mirror, couple has a miscarriage — and is sad — but later has a baby.

This plays out in the data as well, with men showing 24% greater engagement than women during the initial sex scene — the only scene in the ad that features a closeup of a male face. Men also show 24% higher levels over overall engagement during the scene depicting endometriosis, though this is largely driven Attention and Encoding. Although men show 12% greater engagement levels during the birth scene, just before the final montage and call to action, the ad resonates in a more cohesive way with women overall.

For example, men are much more engaged with the ad as it initially opens, but quickly drop off. Incidentally, this is at the exact moment where the obstetrician’s scope enters the pregnant women in the opening scene — a moment that is 30% more engaging with women. This is one of many scenes that resonate much more strongly with women, the target audience for this ad and, candidly, the only audience who can truly relate to many of the depicted experiences.

While men briefly engaged at the moment that the one character was observing her new underwear in the mirror, only women showed strong Connection levels throughout that entire scene — from the “new underwear alert,” to the ritual of getting ready, to the seeming ‘prank’ that the character’s body played on her. Similarly, the scene at 1:16 into the ad, where the woman breaths a sigh of relief after having gotten her period (just after the audience sees that her brain takes the “I don’t want children” route) is 26% more resonant with women. Similarly, the scene where “I never want kids ever!” appears in the tunnel, lands 77% more strongly with women than men.

That scene is the start of the ad’s final crescendo, where all of the storylines are brought together — the pleasure, the pain, the love, the hate — with the final call to action and Bodyform brand messaging. This finale is, on average, 30% more persuasive for women and achieves maximum values 95% greater than the response observed in men.

Final thoughts:

We started this piece by addressing the bias that this ad was attempting to bust: The belief that female menstruation and reproductive issues were too difficult to address honestly and openly in advertising. The belief that we’d be better off showing scenes with models in all white underwear, blue liquid, and stories that portray these issues as minor inconveniences at best.

While this ad wasn’t a home run from start to finish, ebbs and flows in consumer engagement should be expected in a spot this long. Women engaged with most of the main storylines, and did so in a way that more than suggests that they were following and connecting with the experiences depicted. This is further evidenced by the exponential increase in persuasiveness from the start of the final montage all the way through to the fall call to action.

And while this may have been just another feminine hygiene product ad for men, for women, it’s BIAS BUSTED!