AMV BBDO's Margaux Revol on Reclaiming the Womb and the Rise of Femtech

Margaux Revol is strategy partner at AMV BBDO. She is a thinker who likes to push boundaries and buttons to enable deep change. Her world-famous, boundary-breaking campaigns for Bodyform/Libresse have overturned shame and stigma around women’s periods, vulvas and intimate experiences.

#Bloodnormal, #VivalaVulva, #Wombstories and #Painstories have won over 250 creative, strategic and effective awards. Over the last five years, Margaux’s disruptive thinking has helped build Bodyform/Libresse into the fastest-growing femcare brand in the world, the second most awarded brand in the world, and the jewel in the crown of Essity—despite being a challenger brand.

When she’s not dealing with vaginas, she’s tackling other important issues, including disability inclusion and protecting women from abuse. We spoke with Margaux for our series Checkup, where we chat with leaders in the healthcare marketing space.

Margaux, tell us… 

Where you grew up, and where you live now.

I grew up in Paris and have been living in London for eight years.

How you first got into healthcare marketing, and what attracted you to it.

Through Bodyform/Libresse, five or six years ago. I felt like there was a huge gap between the critical role period products play in our lives and how damaging the category’s historical marketing had been. It felt like something that could benefit billions of people by addressing it.

Something people might not know about the healthcare industry.

There are so many aspects in health and wellbeing. Unless we take a more holistic approach of people’s experiences, it’s unlikely we’ll make a real positive difference.

A recent project you’re proud of.

#Wombstories and #Painstories—reclaiming the womb from its clinical, commoditized state you hear about in biology text books, and making it a seat of powerful, complex emotions and stories. It’s enabled so many women and womb bearers to look back on their journey, traumas, pain and joys and put their words on it. It’s helped us give birth to a Pain Dictionary to help accelerate the diagnosis of endometriosis, a condition suffered by 1 in 10 women, yet taking, on average, eight years to get a diagnosis.

Someone else’s project in healthcare that you were impressed by recently.

I loved the accessible pregnancy test prototype from The&Partnership in collaboration with RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People). It’s obviously only a prototype, but the power of it could be huge, so I do hope it gets properly produced to allow all women with sight loss to know their result privately for the first time.

A major challenge facing healthcare advertisers today.

Doing purpose right and authentically. Helping to address the diversity and gender imbalance not just in advertising but in insights and products in the first place.

One thing about how healthcare is evolving that you’re excited about.

The feminization and modernization of healthcare through the impulse of femtech is hugely exciting.

How healthcare can attract more creative talent.

Proving the products themselves can be innovative and people-centric. Making brave and diverse work.

What you would be doing if you weren’t in healthcare marketing.

I would still be working on gender and human rights, like I do with Refuge or Valuable500.