Project Brief

Product Health product (fiber laxative)

Rationale

The campaign uniquely positions Metamucil as an undercover agent, working quietly on the inside. The campaign was inspired by spy/fighting crime culture, adopting interrogations, wanted posters and secret missions; by drawing from movie aesthetics and pop culture references. An Inside Job reframes gut health, which is often easy to ignore, into narrative that encourages adults to look after their insides. The campaign creates a cohesive narrative that’s adapted across different touchpoints, allowing Metamucil’s benefits to be communicated using humor whilst remaining consistent with the brands main purpose. Ultimately, An Inside Job reimagines gut health from an overlooked everyday issue into an engaging narrative, positioning Metamucil as the inside source that helps Australians look after their insides.

To develop the big idea, I started with word association and mapping every connection I could find to the gut, the digestive system, and the feeling of a sore tummy, this process revealed cultural references, phrases and spy undertones that eventually led to the big idea: An Inside Job. The most influential idea shaping this campaign was identifying a gap nobody else in the health sector had claimed. Research found that the advertising in the health sector was serious, loaded with information and clinical.

Early concepts involved researching diseases that affect the gut, originally leading me toward a hero narrative where Metamucil defeats the enemy of gut disease. However, this felt predictable and had been done before, so I decided to flip it, making Metamucil the villain suspected of doing too much good. This pushed me to testing headlines and taglines until the tone of the language felt right. I struggled most with the radio script and activation pitch. To work through the creative block, I spoke with people who had used Metamucil, watched recent pop-up activations and gathered unexpected ideas from a range of sources, including an episode from The Simpsons that sparked the idea of an immersive physical learning experience. While I struggle to simplify concepts to communicate the big idea, I found that “less is often more…”, this encouraged me to constantly edit my executions, deleting any unnecessary words to strengthen the impact of the copy.