Who: Non-profit organization Period., with Public Inc. for creative, strategy and production (Eva Midgley directing); RedLabTO for post production; and Pirate Sound for music.
What: “Deck the Stalls,” an awareness campaign featuring a fictional holiday demon named "Crampus" educating the public about period poverty. The campaign material drives donations to Period.org, enabling the organization to continue distributing menstrual products to grassroots organizations.
What: “Deck the Stalls,” an awareness campaign featuring a fictional holiday demon named "Crampus" educating the public about period poverty. The campaign material drives donations to Period.org, enabling the organization to continue distributing menstrual products to grassroots organizations.
When & Where: The campaign is in market now in the U.S. and Canada, running across OLV, digital, social, OOH, and wild postings. All media placements were coordinated by Public. Inc using donated media. Local Period. volunteers will also be distributing menstrual products and information in cities across North America.
Why: In lieu of a traditional holiday card, Public Inc. chooses a social cause every holiday season for which to raise funds (like this, and this). It identified period poverty as its 2023 focus, with proprietary research conducted in partnership with YouGov finding that more than one-third (36%) of people who menstruate in Canada and the U.S. say they or their family has struggled to afford menstrual products.
“Period products are often taxed by local jurisdictions, making these essential items even more expensive for people who need them,” said Period’s executive director, Michela Bedard, in a release. “When Public Inc. brought us the idea of Crampus spreading the word about period poverty, we couldn’t say no.”
How: Knowing how difficult it is to break through at this busy time of year, creative directors Heather Apple and Erin Stevens wanted to tackle period poverty with humour and satire, which naturally led to some word play. “Deck the Stalls'' is, of course, a riff on the traditional Christmas carol, while Crampus is a mash-up of “cramps” and “Krampus,” the horned folklore character who scares misbehaved children during the holiday season.
Crampus, AKA the period Santa, is sassy and crude because she has to be– she’s on a mission to smash the patriarchy by making period products accessible to all. “We reinvented the character as a vigilante, an anti-Santa, with less magic and more unhinged determination to bring period products to those in need,” Apple and Stevens told The Message.
In the two-minute anchor video, the Christmas demon, played by Toronto actress Rachel Sellan, emerges from the bathroom in a red-cloak, Santa Claus style, and introduces herself with a variety of edgy puns that make it clear she’s not the jolly man. “I’m not the mythical figure you want, I’m the one you deserve,” she says.
Wearing a blood-red suit and bejewelled horns, custom designed by stylist and costume designer Marie-Eve Tremblay, Crampus eats vulva-shaped cookies and stuffs tampons into stockings, then reveals a long list of names (referring to the YouGov statistic) of people struggling to afford menstrual products.
So what does she want? Your money, or else she’ll “sit on your lap and menstruate all over you.” “Tis the season to make the cash flow match the blood flow, to make it rain period products, to ‘Deck the Stalls,’” she says as a super directs to DeckTheStalls.org, where viewers are encouraged to donate.
And we quote: “We’re excited to continue to work with Period. chapters and other partners to Deck The Stalls of public bathrooms everywhere. We hope this campaign raises tons of money because period poverty really does suck ovaries” Heather Apple and Erin Stevens, creative directors, Public Inc.
