Health Campaign
Case Study — 05
Because
I'm Both
"Combining medical expertise and lived experience to make a very private topic a lot easier to talk about."
"Combining medical expertise and lived experience to make a very private topic a lot easier to talk about."
[ The Challenge ]
To be fair, we get it. A condition that involves gas, bloating, and unpredictable pooping is not exactly dinner party conversation. People manage it, live with it, quietly google solutions at 2am, and figure out how to carry on. Engaging publicly with a brand about it? Not really on the agenda.
Culturelle needed to change that. The goal was to position the brand as a trusted entry point into a conversation that most people were having in private — if they were having it at all — and create a space where people actually felt comfortable showing up.
Here's the thing though: people were already talking about IBS. Just not anywhere a brand could easily see them. The real conversations were happening on Reddit, in threads where the anonymity made people feel safe enough to be honest, detailed, and very direct about what they were experiencing. The barrier wasn't that people were unwilling to talk. It was that they didn't trust the spaces where brands were trying to reach them.
But you know who has absolutely no problem talking about tummy woes? Moms and doctors. We noticed that medical professionals who were personally navigating IBS — or raising kids through it — were landing differently than either pure clinical voices or traditional lifestyle influencers. They could speak with authority and from experience at the same time, and that combination was uniquely believable. So we found that when we gave them a throne from which to speak, the content flowed naturally. 😉
We built the whole campaign around that dynamic. Instead of going with traditional influencers or purely clinical voices, I led the development of a strategy centered on medically credentialed creators who could speak to IBS from both perspectives at once — the goal being a layer of trust that neither approach could build on its own.
That meant being very intentional about who we brought in, building a structure that supported genuine storytelling, and making sure the content felt honest rather than polished into something unrecognizable. We weren't trying to make IBS feel cute or sanitized. We were trying to make it feel safe enough to talk about — which is a different thing entirely.
The campaign came to life as Because I'm Both, featuring medically credentialed creators sharing their own real experiences with IBS alongside their professional knowledge.
We designed the content to feel conversational and direct, leaving room for nuance instead of forcing a tidy narrative. The tone matched what we'd seen in those Reddit threads: honest, specific, and refreshingly unbothered about the less glamorous details. Poop included. Across the campaign, we amplified 56 personal stories — each one adding to a broader sense that this was a community, not just a content series.
The comments told the real story. People were showing up, sharing their own experiences, and responding to each other in ways that felt genuinely supportive. Not the performative kind of engagement where someone drops a heart emoji and keeps scrolling. Real, "oh my god me too" energy.
It confirmed what we suspected from the beginning: people are absolutely willing to talk about this stuff. They just needed to feel like they were in a space that could handle it.
[ Campaign Content — Instagram ]
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