Client: Canesten (Bayer)
Thrush. There, we said it – already more plainly than millions of young women feel able to. For Canesten, HelloFranses! created a bold, social-first campaign about one of women’s health’s most common conditions – and one of culture’s least volunteered conversations. A campaign about itching, embarrassment, discreet Google searches and the uniquely British instinct to pretend nothing uncomfortable is happening. Our job was to make thrush feel less like a mortifying private incident and more like what it is: common, treatable and absolutely worth doing something about. Simple enough in theory. Considerably less so for a highly regulated OTC medicine brand. We had to be medically immaculate and socially magnetic - which is a fairly high bar when your subject matter is a non-sexually transmitted fungal infection caused by an overgrowth of Candida yeast. So we built ‘It’s Just Thrush’: scripted, compliant, Gen Z-native social content that used awkward POVs, painfully familiar inner monologues and knowing, meme-literate humour to create a chorus of “oh God, that’s me” recognition. And it worked…. Alongside 87 million impressions, 255,000 15-second video views and 189,000 landing page visits, a post-campaign Exposed-vs-Unexposed Audience Impact Study among 18–24-year-old women found that those who saw the work were 11% more likely to agree thrush is common and nothing to feel embarrassed about, 13% more likely to seek trusted advice, and 16% more likely to act sooner if they suspected symptoms.
