the monthly
shoppers drug mart
2019 Cannes: Public Service, Sustainable Golds - Poverty (shortlist)
2019 Communication Arts, Advertising Annual 60
2019 Marketing Awards: Public Service, Direct (Gold)
2019 Marketing Awards: Public Service, Experiential (Silver)
2019 Strategy Awards: Cause/Public Service (Silver)
2019 The One Show (Merit)
2018 Advertising & Design Club of Canada: Advertising, Direct (Gold)
2018 Advertising & Design Club of Canada: Advertising, Experiential (Silver)
The cheapest box of tampons is around seven dollars, leaving thousands of homeless women in Canada to make an impossible decision: food or tampons?
Desperate, they resort to making their own out of whatever they can find. Dirty socks. Paper towels. And these makeshift tampons produce serious, and even deadly, infections.
Shoppers Drug Mart asked: how can we provide feminine hygiene products to homeless women — wherever they are, and whenever they need them?
The answer was hiding in plain sight.
We created a card with the code to the boxes as well as their locations and distributed them to homeless shelters and outreach programs in Toronto.
Front
Back
While researching period poverty, we learned a surprising fact: most homeless people own smartphones. So we created a web app with The Monthly's location data and codes that they can access anytime, anywhere.
Despite our best efforts to keep The Monthly a secret, word got out.
And once people found out about it, a larger conversation began. Politicians, activists, and members of the homeless community were reinvigorated and inspired to fight period poverty in a whole new way. Toronto City Council agreed to allow Shoppers to install boxes anywhere in the city, and even waived the fees.
Agency: john st.
CD: Cher Campbell, Mark Scott
AD: Lia MacLeod
UX/Dev: Josh Richards, Teunis Vorsteveld
