How Ariel’s Share The Load Put A Chore At The Centre Of An Argument
Ariel’s Share the Load asked who does the washing, which is not a question a detergent brand has any commercial reason to raise. Built at BBDO India, it turned a category that had spent decades addressing women into one arguing about why it was addressing them.
Agency: BBDO India, co-founded in 2008 by Josy Paul
Glass Lion Golds at Cannes in 2015, 2016 and 2017
Twice ranked the world’s most effective campaign by WARC
Framed domestic laundry as a question about shared responsibility rather than performance
Why Share The Load Was A Commercial Risk
Detergent advertising had a settled formula: address the woman, promise a better result, show the result. The buyer and the washer were assumed to be the same person, and every media plan was built on that assumption.
Suggesting the arrangement itself was unfair meant telling a large part of the existing audience that the thing they did every day should not be theirs alone to do. Brands rarely pick a fight with the habit that sells the product.
What It Did Differently From A Cause Campaign
Most brand purpose work borrows a social issue that has nothing to do with the product. This one did not have to reach.
The unfairness was inside the category. That is why it held up commercially as well as at award shows, and it is the distinction between a campaign about laundry and a campaign that merely happens to be sponsored by a laundry brand.
The Argument It Reopened
Read next to Lalitaji, the pair mark the two ends of a thirty-year shift. In 1984 the achievement was making the housewife the expert in the room. By the mid-2010s the achievement was asking why the room was arranged that way at all.
Both are arguments about the same chore. Only the assumption underneath them changed, and the second campaign works because the first one is still remembered.
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