How do you wipe yours?

One thing you need to know about me; I’m not just a bold convention-defying creative, I’m also intensely strategic.

Great creative can’t exist without solid strategy. Ideas are nothing without a robust audience insight and at least 45 Powerpoint slides on competitor analysis and brand purpose.

So when my agency won the account for Andrex toilet roll, we knew we’d have to get our hands dirty. Together with a team of planners, data scientists and social anthropologists, I attended hundreds of product workshops; observing thousands of people using our product and engaging them in a dialogue about what, on a fundamental level, toilet roll means.

What we discovered was that while most people think of toilet paper simply as a conduit; transporting human excrement from A to B (anus to bog), it’s actually so much more than that. It’s a conversation starter.

And so Scrunch or Fold was born. In this campaign we boldly challenged the received wisdom that the intimate details of what a person does in the toilet are among their most private and embarrassing secrets and any sane person would be utterly mortified to discuss it publicly - with the powerfully counter-intuitive insight that…. maybe it’s fine?

This was a campaign that transcended advertising and impacted culture. All the awards and industry recognition are nothing compared to the knowledge that your work is having an effect out there in the real world.

And so I’ll never forget that Christmas morning when my 94-year-old grandmother came up to me, tears in her eyes and a freshly scrunched wad of proud brown Andrex in her hand, and embraced me saying simply… “thank you“.

Guys, at the end of the day, aren’t moments like that really why we do what do?