CARE France's #RespectezNosRegles campaign, created pro bono by CLM BBDO in 2019, used a one-minute film and Instagram activation to challenge menstrual stigma
ARCHIVECARE France RespectezNosRegles Reframes Menstrual Stigma as an Education Crisis
CARE France's #RespectezNosRegles campaign is a 2019 French public interest film created pro bono by CLM BBDO that uses a mother-and-daughter school-morning narrative to expose how menstrual stigma forces girls out of education in lower-income and developing-country contexts.
Launched on 21 January 2019 in France, the campaign centred on a single one-minute film distributed across television, web, and social media, according to records held by clapboard.com and adsoftheworld.com. The title translates directly as "Respect Our Periods," a deliberate double meaning in French where "règles" carries both the sense of rules and menstruation. That linguistic ambiguity is the campaign's conceptual spine, allowing CARE to address an intimate subject within a universally legible framework of fairness and rights.
CARE International is a global humanitarian organisation focused on poverty reduction, gender equality, and emergency and development work, with CARE France operating as its national affiliate. The #RespectezNosRegles campaign represents one of the organisation's most visible French public-service interventions, mobilising the reach of social media alongside a broader coalition of voices to shift public attitudes. In France, the campaign landed within a media climate shaped by ongoing feminist discourse, giving CARE France a receptive context in which to argue that menstrual taboo is not a private inconvenience but a structural barrier to girls' schooling. The campaign's objectives were threefold: raise awareness of the issue among French audiences, recruit public supporters to amplify the message, and sustain momentum beyond the film's initial release through planned activation events.
CARE France identified menstrual stigma as a subject that suffers from public silence precisely because it intersects discomfort with inequality. The strategic insight driving #RespectezNosRegles was that a universally relatable domestic scene — a mother helping her daughter prepare for school — could carry an audience into a reality they would otherwise find difficult to engage with directly. By grounding the film's narrative in an ordinary French morning and then revealing its stakes through a twist, CLM BBDO created an entry point that bypassed the defensiveness that more confrontational public-service approaches can provoke.
The campaign launched in France in January 2019, a period in which French civil society was actively debating gender equality following the international momentum of the #MeToo movement. According to arpp.org, France's advertising self-regulatory body, public interest advertising operates within a framework that encourages responsible treatment of social issues, and the campaign's restrained, emotionally intelligent tone reflects awareness of that context. Total advertiser communication spending in France stood at approximately €34 billion in 2019, according to documents sourced from Documents Communication-Democratie, placing CARE's pro bono film within an intensely competitive attention economy where NGOs rarely hold structural advantages over commercial advertisers.
Organisations such as Amnesty International France and Médecins Sans Frontières represent the competitive reference points in French public-service communication, both deploying sophisticated narrative filmmaking to sustain donor and public engagement. Against that backdrop, CLM BBDO's decision to complement the film with an Instagram activation — deliberately written with errors to represent the truncated education of girls who leave school at age 12 — gave #RespectezNosRegles a multi-platform coherence that most single-asset NGO campaigns lack, as documented by clapboard.com.
The film at the heart of #RespectezNosRegles runs for one minute, a duration that demands economy and precision from every creative decision. According to shots Magazine, which published substantive coverage on 23 January 2019, the film was directed by Dr Bowman and produced by Players Paris. shots described the work as an "emotional" story with a "clever twist," language that points to a craft approach built on restraint rather than spectacle.
The narrative follows a mother and daughter through the rituals of a school morning, a sequence rendered with the visual grammar of domestic realism — natural light, close physical detail, the unhurried pace of a scene the audience believes it already understands. That familiarity is the creative instrument. When the film's twist recontextualises what the audience has watched, the emotional shift is amplified precisely because the staging has been so carefully ordinary. Dr Bowman's direction withholds sentiment until the moment it carries the greatest structural weight.
The supporting Instagram activation extended the creative logic into a second medium. Posts written with deliberate grammatical and spelling errors functioned as a visual argument: this is what education interrupted at age 12 looks like in language. The device required no explanatory copy to land its point, which reflects a confidence in the audience's interpretive capacity that is itself a creative choice. Across both executions, CLM BBDO maintained a consistent tonal register — neither didactic nor melodramatic — that positioned CARE France as an organisation speaking with authority rather than urgency. As documented by packshotmag.com, the campaign's production quality gave a pro bono project the visual credibility of a fully funded commercial campaign.
ARCHIVENo independently verified performance data for #RespectezNosRegles beyond the figures reported by carefrance.org and clapboard.com is publicly available. Within those documented records, the campaign reached more than two million views on social media, according to carefrance.org, a figure that represents meaningful organic reach for a pro bono public-service film without a reported paid media budget. More than fifty personalities and feminist collectives lent their public support to the campaign, according to the same source, providing an amplification network that extended the film's distribution beyond CARE France's own channels.
A continuation event on 28 May gave the campaign a second phase of public presence, according to carefrance.org, suggesting that the initial January launch generated sufficient momentum to sustain organised activation over several months. That structural arc — film launch followed by coalition building followed by a mobilisation event — is a model that public-service campaigns increasingly deploy to convert awareness into demonstrated social pressure.
Clapboard's editorial assessment places #RespectezNosRegles at a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects a campaign that executes its central creative idea with genuine craft and strategic coherence, and that achieved measurable reach without paid support, while acknowledging that the absence of publicly documented outcome data — changes in awareness, fundraising results, or policy engagement — limits a full evaluation of its downstream impact. The film's durability as a reference point in French public-service creative work is supported by its continued presence across adsoftheworld.com and trade press archives.
#RespectezNosRegles is a 2019 French public-service film created by CARE France and CLM BBDO pro bono. The one-minute film uses a mother-and-daughter school-morning narrative to expose how menstrual stigma forces girls out of education. It launched on 21 January 2019 across television, web, and social media in France.
CLM BBDO created the campaign pro bono. The Paris-based agency, operating within the BBDO network, produced the film alongside production company Players Paris, with direction by Dr Bowman. The work was documented by shots Magazine and adsoftheworld.com upon its January 2019 launch in France.
Dr Bowman directed the film for CARE France. Production company Players Paris handled the production. shots Magazine named both in coverage published on 23 January 2019, describing the film as an emotional story with a clever twist rooted in a domestic mother-and-daughter school-morning narrative.
The campaign reached more than two million views on social media, according to carefrance.org. More than fifty personalities and feminist collectives supported the campaign. A follow-up mobilisation event on 28 May extended its public presence beyond the initial January 2019 launch in France.
CLM BBDO created Instagram posts deliberately written with spelling and grammatical errors. The errors represented the truncated literacy of girls who leave school at age 12 due to menstrual stigma. The activation extended the film's creative argument into social media without requiring additional explanatory copy, as documented by clapboard.com.
CARE #RespectezNosRegles received a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score recognises the campaign's craft, strategic coherence, and organic reach of more than two million views, while reflecting the absence of publicly documented outcome data measuring downstream awareness or behavioural impact beyond the initial French launch.
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