Clorets Turns Bad Breath Into a Film Moment for South Africa
Clorets launched the In-Breather campaign in South Africa in May 2018, a single-asset film created by Ogilvy Cape Town that uses situational comedy to dramatise the social discomfort of bad breath and position the confectionery brand as the definitive remedy for everyday oral freshness, according to Whoownswhom Co Za.
The campaign belongs to the confectionery and snacks category and was produced through Giant Films, with Karien Cherry directing the execution. The work stands as one of a broader cluster of related executions — archived companion pieces titled Labour and Yoga are also documented — suggesting the In-Breather film functions as part of a wider campaign system built around distinct social scenarios in which unpleasant breath creates visible, comic consequence for those nearby. The consistent thread across these executions is the involuntary victim: the person who must inhale what the protagonist exhales, rendered with enough physical specificity to make the gag land without laboured explanation.
In the South African market, where Clorets competes for share of mouth against both international confectionery giants and locally resonant snack brands, the creative decision to anchor the campaign in film rather than static formats is significant, according to Marketsizesbeta Mintel. Film allows character, timing, and reaction to do the strategic work that product claims alone cannot. Ogilvy's approach here prioritises behavioural truth over brand assertion, letting the discomfort of the scenario carry the product's functional promise implicitly. The Clapboard Score for In-Breather stands at 60 out of 100, reflecting a campaign that executes its comic premise with craft but stops short of the kind of cultural or emotional ambition that distinguishes category-defining work. The archive record dates the campaign's publication to May 2018, and a single media asset is documented.
Clorets occupies a specific position in the confectionery and snacks landscape: a brand with genuine functional heritage that must continually justify its place in a consumer's pocket or bag against both habitual alternatives and newer oral-care formats. The brand's history is long — Clorets launched in 1951 as a chewing-gum and mint brand, according to sources including Wikipedia and Alchetron — and that longevity brings both equity and the challenge of sustained relevance across generations of consumers.
In South Africa in 2018, the competitive environment for breath-freshening confectionery was shaped by the presence of two dominant global players. Mars Wrigley, whose portfolio includes Extra, Orbit, and Eclipse, and Mondelez International, whose Adams division — the same division through which Cadbury Schweppes acquired Clorets in 2002 and 2003 before the brand passed to Kraft Foods in 2010, as documented in brand ownership records — together represented nearly 60 percent of global chewing-gum dollar sales, according to data cited by the Federal Trade Commission. That level of category concentration means that for Clorets, creative distinctiveness is not a luxury but a competitive necessity, according to Globaldata.
Ogilvy's strategic choice to dramatise the experience of the person who suffers another's bad breath — rather than the person who carries the product — is a deliberate inversion of the standard confectionery advertising formula. Most gum and mint advertising centres on the user's confidence or pleasure after consumption. In-Breather shifts the camera to the involuntary witness, making the social consequence of not using the product the emotional engine of the film. This insight-led reversal is structurally stronger than a product-benefit claim because it locates the consumer's motivation in social empathy and mild embarrassment rather than aspiration alone, instincts that are reliably durable across demographic segments in the South African market.
Giant Films produced the In-Breather campaign for Clorets, with Karien Cherry directing. Cherry's involvement is the most specific creative attribution available in the public record for this campaign, and the choice of a film production house with Giant Films' standing in the South African commercial production landscape signals that the execution was treated as a craft project rather than a functional delivery.
The film medium demands a different order of precision from a breath-freshening product campaign than print or outdoor would require. Comedy in particular is unforgiving: the timing of a reaction shot, the calibration of an actor's physical response, and the framing of the moment at which discomfort tips into absurdity all determine whether a comic premise lands or collapses. In-Breather's single-asset structure means that everything the campaign needs to communicate — brand identity, product truth, tonal character — must be accomplished within one uninterrupted viewing experience, without the repetition or variation that a multi-execution campaign affords.
The companion executions titled Labour and Yoga, identified in the advertising archive record, suggest that the creative system was designed with scenario variety in mind, each film isolating a different social context in which the In-Breather dynamic plays out. This scenario-based architecture is a recognised approach in confectionery advertising, where the product's benefit is situational rather than transformational, and the comedy must feel discovered rather than constructed. Ogilvy Cape Town's creative direction on this body of work keeps the product implicit rather than foregrounded, trusting the audience to complete the logical connection between the discomfort shown and the remedy offered. Production credits beyond Cherry's directorial role are not publicly documented in available sources for this campaign.
No verified performance data for the Clorets In-Breather campaign is publicly available. No sales lift, volume growth, market-share change, brand-tracking results, or return on advertising spend figures have been documented in any publicly accessible source, and no awards recognition for this campaign has been verified at Cannes Lions, the Effies, The One Show, D&AD, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or the WARC Awards.
Structural analysis, however, offers a reasonable basis for assessment. The campaign's core mechanism — inverting the standard confectionery advertising perspective from user to unwilling bystander — is strategically coherent and creatively differentiated from the category norm. In a South African market where Mars Wrigley and Mondelez command dominant share across the breath-freshening segment, a Clorets film that generates a genuine behavioural insight into why consumers reach for a mint or a piece of gum has the potential to drive both recall and purchase intent, provided the comic timing sustains the insight rather than overwhelms it.
The Clapboard Score of 60 out of 100 positions In-Breather as a competent and purposeful piece of category advertising that demonstrates clear creative thinking without achieving the kind of breakthrough craft or cultural resonance that would place it in the upper tier of confectionery film work. The single-asset structure limits its reach architecture, and the absence of any documented trade press coverage or social media amplification suggests the campaign's impact, while likely meaningful at a local South African level, did not extend into the broader industry conversation that awards-level work typically generates.
Clorets In-Breather is a 2018 South African film campaign created by Ogilvy Cape Town and produced by Giant Films. It dramatises the social discomfort of bad breath by focusing on the involuntary bystander rather than the product user, using situational comedy to communicate Clorets' breath-freshening benefit without foregrounding a direct product claim.
Karien Cherry directed the Clorets In-Breather film. Cherry worked with production company Giant Films on the campaign, which Ogilvy Cape Town created and published in South Africa in May 2018. Beyond Cherry's directorial credit, further production credits for the campaign are not publicly documented in available sources.
Ogilvy Cape Town created the Clorets In-Breather campaign. The agency published the single-asset film in South Africa in May 2018, positioning it within the confectionery and snacks category. Related executions titled Labour and Yoga suggest In-Breather was part of a broader scenario-based creative system built around the same comic premise.
The Clorets In-Breather campaign received a Clapboard Score of 60 out of 100. This score reflects a campaign that executes its comic premise with clear strategic intent and reasonable craft, but does not reach the level of cultural ambition or creative breakthrough associated with the highest-performing work in the confectionery advertising category.
No awards recognition for the Clorets In-Breather campaign has been verified. A search of major industry award bodies — including Cannes Lions, the Effies, The One Show, D&AD, the Clios, and the WARC Awards — returned no documented entries or wins for this Ogilvy South Africa campaign from 2018.
Clorets launched in 1951 as a chewing-gum and mint brand, according to Wikipedia and Alchetron. Ownership passed through American Chicle, Warner-Lambert, Pfizer, Cadbury Schweppes, and Kraft Foods. At the time of the 2018 South African In-Breather campaign, the brand sat within Mondelez International's confectionery and snacks portfolio following Kraft's subsequent restructuring.
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