The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2021
Hey Girls' Seeing Red makes Britain so angry about period poverty it has to act
adam&eveDDB worked with a psychologist to build anger into the ads, turning period poverty into outrage that ends with Hey Girls as the fix.
Hey Girls
What it had to solve
Hey Girls is a social enterprise that fights period poverty through a buy-one-give-one model, but it was fairly unknown and its sales were low. It needed a campaign that grabbed attention and compelled people to act, not one that simply asked for sympathy.
How it works
Hey Girls is a social enterprise whose goal is to eradicate period poverty through a buy-one-give-one model — every product sold funds one that is donated. The problem was that Hey Girls was fairly unknown, and its sales were low as a result.
adam&eveDDB answered with psychology: with the help of a psychologist it found that anger is one of the most motivating emotions. So it created an online, audio and print campaign designed to make viewers so angry about period poverty that they had to act on it.
The campaign then positioned Hey Girls as the solution, giving the manufactured outrage somewhere to go. The work is archived in D&AD's awards archive; the idea — engineer anger, then sell the fix — is the documented case.
Why it lands
- Anger is one of the few emotions that pushes people to act, which is why the psychologist's finding set the whole direction.
- Making the injustice vivid enough to feel personal turned the response into release rather than charity.
- Positioning Hey Girls as the solution gave the manufactured outrage a destination inside the campaign itself.
- Running one emotional engine across online, audio and print multiplied the moments of anger without inventing a new idea per channel.
What it did
The campaign chose outrage over pity as its fuel, turning an unknown social enterprise into the named answer to an injustice people could no longer ignore. D&AD's awards archive documents the work and the anger-driven mechanism behind it.
What you can take
When a cause is failing on awareness, look for the emotion that actually precedes action: anger motivates faster than sympathy when the ad itself supplies a way to act on it.
Since then
Seeing Red launched in May 2021 as Hey Girls' first big push for national attention on UK period poverty. The D&AD archive records no reach figures, so the case stands on the mechanism: choose the emotion that precedes action, then hand the audience the fix.
Sources
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