How CEO Ben Keeps Pooping All Day - Depend | Clapboard Ad Archive

Depend’s 2017 campaign How CEO Ben Keeps Pooping All Day finds the brand leveraging a bold creative concept within the healthcare market, enlisting the narrative of Benjamin Dover, an archetypal high-powered executive whose demanding corporate schedule leaves little time to manage personal needs. With Agency activating the film-driven work, the campaign adopts an unabashedly humorous tone to address a topic often considered taboo, using CEO Ben’s relentless workload and unfiltered personality to make a relatable, aspirational user profile the centerpiece of the story—an approach squarely in what Clapboard's taxonomy terms FORMAT#10—Associated User Imagery. By charting Dover’s day-to-day navigation of boardrooms, deadlines, and challenging conversations, the ad directly ties Depend’s product benefit to the needs of busy professionals who require reliability and discretion to maintain their active lives, subtly reframing incontinence management as an enabler of continued achievement rather than a limitation. Two core media assets—including engaging filmic outtakes—build authenticity and deepen the humorous edge, encouraging audiences to engage past the initial narrative and extending the campaign’s reach through participation and sharing. The storytelling is calibrated to generate empathy as well as reduce the social stigma surrounding incontinence by positioning it within the experience of someone with perceived authority, success, and real-world credibility—a choice that both normalizes the brand’s offering and builds emotional resonance with viewers who might see themselves or their aspirations in CEO Ben. The lightness of the delivery, coupled with the pragmatic framing of a universal human challenge, positions Depend on the front foot within a crowded health category, differentiating by virtue of tone, relatability, and directness. The choice to anchor the campaign in Associated User Imagery, as classified by Clapboard's 12-format schema, situates the communication in a lineage of advertising that seeks to drive both identification and aspiration, a strategic move that sees the brand trade up against both stigma and monotony in medical messaging. Clapboard rates this 63/100. For health marketers navigating the balance between sensitivity and standout storytelling, this campaign signals that humor and humanization now have a firm place in even the most personal corners of brand communication.