A toilet paper brand making a campaign about constipation in schoolchildren sounds like a difficult brief. FCB London treated it as a public health issue, backed it with data serious enough to appear in a doctor’s waiting room, and made a television commercial in which a boy skateboarding through a classroom to the school toilets is framed as an act of bravery. It won the Thinkboxes award for TV advertising creativity. The data behind it is more alarming than the ad.
The Research That Drove the Brief
Andrex’s “Toilet Truths” research found that 75% of UK school children do not feel comfortable doing a poo at school. The consequences of that discomfort are not trivial. 59% of children surveyed said they have gone home feeling physically uncomfortable after holding in a poo all day. 45% have held their poo to the point of physical pain. Thirty percent have skipped lunch to avoid the possibility of needing to go. 42% do not drink water at school to reduce the risk. 63% worry about being teased. Sixty-one percent are embarrassed to ask a teacher for permission to leave the classroom.
The aggregate consequence of those individual decisions is significant. Andrex estimates that nearly 2.59 million children in the UK are at risk of long-term health problems including constipation and haemorrhoids as a direct result of holding in bowel movements at school. The campaign is built on a medical reality, not a hypothetical, which is what gives it permission to be funny without being trivial.
The Film
The hero TVC opens with a boy sitting in a classroom, visibly uncomfortable. He accidentally farts. The class stares. He spots the Andrex puppy, and something shifts. He picks up a toilet roll, steps onto a skateboard, and glides through the classroom as his classmates cheer him on. He enters the school toilet cubicle. He has a poo.
The film uses silence and the very specific sounds of a school corridor and a toilet block to carry the emotional journey from shame to relief. Kyle Harman-Turner, executive creative director and creative partner at FCB London, described the creative objective: “We talked about not only surfacing the next round of toilet taboos, of which there are many, but to create work that could have a real, tangible change and programme behind it.”
Matt Stone, senior director of creative design and experience at Kimberly-Clark, described the campaign’s media logic plainly: “Get Comfortable is a 360-degree campaign with assets across everything from out-of-home to TikTok to reactive digital vans. But TV still remains the best way to reach the nation at scale.”
The Platform It Sits Inside
First School Poo is the latest instalment of Andrex’s “Get Comfortable” brand strategy, a platform built explicitly around dismantling toilet taboos across different life stages. The campaign follows “First Office Poo,” which addressed workplace bathroom embarrassment among adults, and “Post Poo Euphoria,” which documented the relief experienced after a successful bowel movement. Each execution targets a specific moment of toilet-related shame and normalises it through humour, honesty, and data.
The school-based instalment is the most operationally consequential of the three because the behaviour it is targeting carries a documented medical risk for children. An adult holding a poo at the office is uncomfortable. A child doing it systematically for years develops health conditions. The campaign’s decision to use a children’s TVC to address this directly, rather than routing the message through parents alone, reflects an understanding of where the shame actually lives and who needs to hear the counter-message.
The Wider Campaign
Alongside the TVC, Andrex launched OOH placements framing a child’s first school poo as a badge of bravery rather than an embarrassing incident. Social activations ran across TikTok. Reactive digital vans carried messaging in proximity to schools. A dedicated online hub provided guidance for parents on how to support children through toilet anxiety, giving the campaign a utility layer beyond the advertising.
Niamh Finan, marketing director at Kimberly-Clark UK and Ireland, described the brand’s ambition: “This campaign is the next step in the evolution of Andrex, to help the nation have a healthier, more confident relationship with the bathroom.”
The Thinkboxes award for TV advertising creativity, won in the May/June 2025 cycle, cited the campaign’s use of silence and potentially embarrassing sounds to tackle toilet taboos as the specific creative achievement that distinguished it. For a product that exists in one of the most avoidance-prone categories in consumer goods, making the country stop and laugh at something they would rather not think about is precisely the brief.
Campaign Name: Conquer the First School Poo / “Get Comfortable”
Agency Name: FCB London
Brand Name: Andrex (Kimberly-Clark)
Location: United Kingdom
