Always #LikeAGirl: Turning an Insult Into a Battle Cry
Ask a ten-year-old girl to run like a girl, and she’ll sprint with everything she has. Ask a teenager to do the same thing, and she’ll probably slow down, flail her arms, and laugh awkwardly. That observation — simple, devastating, and entirely true — became the foundation for one of the most powerful advertising campaigns of the decade.
Always, the feminine hygiene brand owned by Procter & Gamble, launched “#LikeAGirl” in June 2014. Created by Leo Burnett Chicago, the campaign reframed a phrase that had been used as an insult for generations and turned it into a declaration of female strength. The film won the Emmy for Outstanding Commercial in 2015, took Grand Prix at Cannes Lions, and sparked a global cultural conversation that extended far beyond anything a hygiene product brand might reasonably expect to own.
The Insight
The campaign grew from a piece of research that was as simple as it was troubling. Always and Leo Burnett had been exploring the connection between puberty and female confidence, and what they found was consistent: girls’ confidence dropped sharply in the years around puberty, and it didn’t fully recover. By the time young women reached their mid-teens, many had internalized limiting beliefs about their abilities, their bodies, and their right to compete.
The phrase “like a girl” was a symptom of that broader cultural problem. Used since at least the 1970s as shorthand for doing something weakly or incompetently, it had become embedded in everyday language — in schoolyards, in locker rooms, in adult conversation — with little conscious awareness of what it was communicating about girls’ worth and capability.
If you enjoyed the Volvo Epic Split breakdown on this site, “#LikeAGirl” belongs in the same conversation about ads that use a single, sustained idea rather than a string of jokes or features. Documentary filmmaker Lauren Greenfield was brought in to direct the film. Her approach was to conduct a social experiment: she invited people of various ages to “run like a girl,” “throw like a girl,” and “fight like a girl,” and she filmed their responses without staging or coaching.
The results were as expected. Teenage boys and girls, and adult women, performed each action with exaggerated weakness — flailing, mincing, performing an idea of inadequacy. When Greenfield asked the young girls in the film — those still on the near side of puberty — to run, throw, and fight like a girl, they simply ran, threw, and fought. As hard as they could. With everything they had.
The Film
The contrast between the two groups formed the spine of the final film. Cut together with minimal narration, the footage needed almost no explanation. When one of the young girls was asked what it meant to run like a girl, she answered without hesitation: “It means run as fast as you can.”
That line became the moral center of the campaign. It articulated something that adult audiences recognized intuitively but had rarely seen expressed with such direct simplicity — that there had been a moment, somewhere in those complicated years of growing up, when the phrase had been learned, internalized, and allowed to reshape behavior.
The film’s final question — “When did doing something ’like a girl’ become an insult?” — landed with impact precisely because it offered no answer. It trusted the audience to sit with the question and reach their own conclusions.
Leo Burnett’s Strategy
Leo Burnett Chicago, one of the oldest and most celebrated advertising agencies in America, had a long history of creating emotionally resonant advertising — the Marlboro Man, Tony the Tiger, the Jolly Green Giant had all come from their creative floors. But “#LikeAGirl” represented something different: purpose-driven advertising that didn’t just sell a product but staked out a genuine cultural position.
The strategy was built on a core insight about brand relevance: Always is a brand that enters girls’ lives at a particularly vulnerable moment — puberty — and has an opportunity to be something more than a product purchase. If the brand could align itself with confidence and capability during that transitional period, it could build loyalty that would last decades.
Creative direction came from Judy John and Becky McIntyre. The decision to use real people rather than actors, and to structure the film as a genuine experiment rather than scripted drama, gave the final product a credibility that polished advertising rarely achieves.
The Social Media Effect
The campaign launched first on YouTube in June 2014, where it immediately generated millions of views and significant social conversation. The hashtag #LikeAGirl spread rapidly, with women and girls posting videos and messages reclaiming the phrase — sharing stories of the things they had accomplished “like a girl.”
When Always aired a condensed version during Super Bowl XLIX in February 2015, the campaign’s reach expanded to an audience of over 100 million. The Super Bowl spot was one of the most talked-about commercials of the game, notable for being a hygiene brand that had chosen social purpose over product features in one of advertising’s most expensive and competitive arenas.
Criticism and Complexity
As with all cause-driven advertising from consumer goods companies, “#LikeAGirl” attracted its share of skepticism. Critics noted that P&G’s advertising practices across other brands were not uniformly progressive, and that a feminine hygiene brand had an inherent commercial interest in associating menstruation and puberty with its products. The campaign’s emotional authenticity was real, but so was the marketing objective underlying it.
These tensions are present in virtually all purpose-driven advertising, and they don’t necessarily invalidate the work. The question is whether the campaign created genuine cultural change, and on that measure, “#LikeAGirl” performed. Studies conducted by Always showed that the phrase’s negative connotation measurably decreased among those exposed to the campaign, particularly in younger demographic groups.
Legacy
“#LikeAGirl” helped establish the template for what has since become an entire genre of advertising: purpose-driven campaigns that engage social issues as a central creative strategy rather than a peripheral brand message. Its influence can be seen in dozens of campaigns that followed — Gillette’s “The Best Men Can Be”, Nike’s “Dream Crazier”, and Microsoft’s work around disability — each of which owed something to the emotional and strategic blueprint laid down by Leo Burnett’s work for Always.
For more on the campaign’s background and cultural impact, see the Wikipedia entry on Always #LikeAGirl.
Client: Always / Procter & Gamble Agency: Leo Burnett Chicago Director: Lauren Greenfield Year: 2014
