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TENA Women Makes Menopause Unmissable on British TV
TENA Women's #LastLonelyMenopause is a two-minute television film created by AMV BBDO that premiered on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom on 29 April 2022, using a warm and unflinching mother-daughter relationship to portray the physical and emotional realities of menopause in a way British television had not shown before.
The campaign was built around a single, clarifying insight drawn from lived experience: according to The Drum, more than 80 per cent of women rarely speak to their own mothers about menopause. That silence, replicated across generations and households throughout the United Kingdom, became the creative and strategic problem the film set out to solve. The campaign's ambition was not merely to advertise a bladder-weakness product but to change the social conditions under which menopause is discussed — or, more precisely, not discussed. As the campaign's own framing states, one in three women go through menopause feeling profoundly alone.
The mechanism for reaching that audience was substantial. TENA Women and AMV BBDO won Channel 4's 2021 Diversity in Advertising Award, a prize comprising £1 million in Channel 4 commercial airtime, according to Channel 4. An additional £100,000 was provided through Channel 4's 4Studio unit for the production of digital short-form content, per Channel 4. Those resources gave the campaign genuine broadcast scale inside the United Kingdom, with the flagship film airing in primetime and a companion series of social films featuring older and younger people discussing menopause launching on 9 May 2022. The campaign operated across the healthcare and public interest categories, with TENA Women — a brand owned by the Swedish hygiene and health company Essity — deploying the work as a meaningful expansion of its long-running stigma-breaking creative platform. Clapboard rates #LastLonelyMenopause at 79 out of 100.
Channel 4's 2021 Diversity in Advertising brief challenged brands to confront ageism in advertising, according to Channel 4. AMV BBDO identified menopause as the most potent and underserved intersection of age, gender, and taboo available to TENA Women in the United Kingdom — a topic that touched millions of women yet remained effectively invisible in mainstream commercial media.
The strategic logic was reinforced by a specific behavioural reality. As reported by The Drum, more than 80 per cent of women in the United Kingdom rarely discuss menopause with their own mothers — meaning the information deficit is not incidental but structural, transmitted through family silence across generations. Choosing a mother-daughter dynamic as the film's narrative spine was therefore not a sentimental creative choice but a direct response to that data. The relationship depicted on screen is the precise relationship in which the conversation is most conspicuously absent.
TENA Women occupies a strong competitive position in the women's light-incontinence category. According to Grand View Research, the global incontinence pads market was valued at approximately US$6.8 billion in 2022, with Europe accounting for a meaningful proportion of that revenue. Within that landscape, TENA Women's parent Essity holds an estimated 15 to 25 per cent global share of women's light-incontinence pads, according to Grand View Research and Allied Market Research. Its nearest direct competitor, Poise by Kimberly-Clark, holds an estimated 10 to 20 per cent global share by the same sources. In the United Kingdom specifically, both brands compete for a consumer audience shaped by the same cultural reluctance to discuss bladder weakness openly — which is precisely the stigma the #LastLonelyMenopause campaign targeted. By connecting bladder weakness to the broader menopause experience rather than treating it as an isolated embarrassment, AMV BBDO repositioned TENA Women from a functional product to a genuine advocate for women's health in the United Kingdom.
Shannon Murphy directed the #LastLonelyMenopause film for TENA Women, with production handled by Lief. Murphy's direction brings an intimacy and tonal precision to the material that allows the film to move between warmth and discomfort without losing the viewer — a balance that is technically difficult when the subject matter includes rogue facial hair, sudden rage, and urine appearing on screen.
The creative team at AMV BBDO was led by chief creative officers Nicholas Hulley and Nadja Lossgott, with creative director Jim Hilson overseeing the work. Creatives Lauren Peters and Augustine Cerf developed the campaign, with designer Vanessa Fowler Kendall contributing to the visual identity. Agency planners Margaux Revol and Bea Farmelo shaped the strategic underpinning, while the account team of Laura Hazell and Rebecca Thomas managed the client relationship with Essity. Creative production was led by Trish Russell, with senior art producer Rhiannon Nicol and senior interactive social producer Alex Warren handling the extended content ecosystem beyond the broadcast film.
As described by The Drum, the film is notably direct by the standards of bladder-weakness advertising — frank enough to show urine on screen, a level of honesty that the category has historically avoided entirely. That creative decision was deliberate. The film's argument is that shame and indirectness are themselves part of the problem, and a campaign that flinched from depicting the physical reality of menopause would undermine its own case. The companion digital series, produced with Channel 4's 4Studio unit and launched on 9 May 2022, extended the film's conversational register into shorter social formats, allowing older and younger women to continue the dialogue the broadcast film initiated. Per Muse by Clio, the overall execution was described as both funny and frank — a pairing that reflects the tonal intelligence brought to the work by both the AMV BBDO creative team and Murphy's direction.
TENA Women and AMV BBDO won Channel 4's 2021 Diversity in Advertising Award. The prize was worth £1 million in Channel 4 commercial airtime plus an additional £100,000 in digital production support through 4Studio, according to Channel 4. That award represented both recognition of the campaign's creative and strategic merit and the primary mechanism by which the work reached a national audience in the United Kingdom.
No independently verified viewership or sales-lift figures for the #LastLonelyMenopause campaign are publicly available at the time of writing. What the structural evidence does confirm is that the campaign achieved broadcast primetime placement in the United Kingdom — the flagship film aired on Channel 4 on 29 April 2022 at 8:10 p.m. — and generated a sustained content footprint through the 4Studio digital series that launched 9 May 2022. As reported by The Drum, the work was described as genuinely novel for British television in its willingness to depict menopause with directness and without euphemism.
The campaign also carries the weight of TENA Women's longer creative lineage. As noted by Contagious, #LastLonelyMenopause extended a stigma-breaking platform that had previously included the #Ageless campaign, a two-year editorial partnership with The Guardian called The Last Taboo, and the Menopause Monologues series. Each of those initiatives built audience familiarity and brand permission, making the Channel 4 film a credible escalation rather than an isolated intervention. Clapboard scores the campaign 79 out of 100, reflecting the strength of its strategic foundation, the quality of its creative craft, and the significance of the Channel 4 Diversity in Advertising Award as a verifiable measure of cultural impact.
#LastLonelyMenopause is a two-minute television film created by AMV BBDO for TENA Women that premiered on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom on 29 April 2022. It uses a mother-daughter relationship to portray menopause with unusual directness, and it won Channel 4's 2021 Diversity in Advertising Award, worth £1 million in airtime.
TENA Women won because the campaign directly addressed Channel 4's 2021 brief challenging ageism in advertising. AMV BBDO's response tackled menopause — a subject affecting millions of women in the United Kingdom yet rarely depicted on mainstream television — with creative honesty and strategic rigour, according to Channel 4.
Shannon Murphy directed the film, with production handled by Lief. The AMV BBDO creative team included chief creative officers Nicholas Hulley and Nadja Lossgott, creative director Jim Hilson, and creatives Lauren Peters and Augustine Cerf, who developed the campaign concept and script.
The film showed urine on screen — a level of directness the bladder-weakness category had historically avoided. As reported by The Drum, this deliberate choice reflected the campaign's argument that shame and indirectness around menopause and incontinence are themselves part of the problem the work set out to address.
#LastLonelyMenopause extended a long-running stigma-breaking platform that, according to Contagious, included the #Ageless campaign, a two-year editorial series with The Guardian called The Last Taboo, and the Menopause Monologues — each building brand permission for increasingly candid conversations about women's health in the United Kingdom.
Clapboard rates #LastLonelyMenopause at 79 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong strategic foundation in a documented consumer insight, the craft quality of Shannon Murphy's direction, and the verifiable cultural recognition represented by the Channel 4 Diversity in Advertising Award.
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