21st: The bleeding edge

When it comes to creative Web marketing, tampon manufacturers lead the way.

By Jenn Shreve

Mar 18, 1998 | I'll never forget the first time I used a tampon: It was an eighth-grade field trip to a water slide park, and I was bleeding like a wounded soldier. I knew I had two choices: Suffer all day, legs crossed, while my friends did some serious frolicking -- or use a tampon.

Before changing into my swimsuit, I went into a stall to study the hard-to-read, clinical-sounding instructions that came with the box. What the hell were they talking about? Several of my friends were veteran tampon users, but I was alone in that bathroom, fumbling with the cardboard applicator and wincing through the painful insertion.

This memory came flooding back to me when I recently stumbled upon the Tampax Web site -- a treasury of useful information and support for young women undergoing such rites of passage. If only, I thought, I'd had a place like this to turn during the awkward years of puberty.

Tampax.Com is one of the best company sites on the Web. Lots of corporations talk about using the Net to go beyond traditional advertising; Tampax -- along with Kotex, which has built a similar site -- shows what that can mean.

Tampax.Com is split into two main spaces: T Room, a site for girls ages 14 to 16 (though, based on the content, I'd lower that to ages 10 to 14), and the sleek T Lounge, for worldly-wise teenagers (it's ostensibly aimed at women ages 18-24, but it reads just like Seventeen magazine).

T Room is hosted by a fictional character named Tina, whose bedroom serves as a front door to content like fashion critiques, music reviews and a monthly diary. Tampon-shaped navigation bars guide you to everything from issues-oriented articles to creative things to do with tampons. The content has a clearly feminist bent, tossing aside the Spice Girls for strong-woman icons Mary Lou Lord and Ani DiFranco.

For the T Lounge's older visitors, Tampax provides everything from relationship quizzes to monthly themed articles on careers, friendship and beauty. "Relax, put some tunes on the stereo and get ready for some truth!" advises one editorial. The advice questions are frank about sexuality and menstruation. Posts in the moderately active bulletin board range in topics from eating disorders to how to have "real sex." And when you click on a button to redecorate the entire site -- velour, contemporary, outdoorsy or lava lamp -- it'll remember your preferred style on return visits.

Kotex's site, particularly the area called "Girls Space," is similar to the T Room, though its design is less sophisticated -- opting for a cute "girly" lavender background and pull-down menus instead of the hip navy hues and mouse-activated headlines of Tampax's site. And the majority of the content deals with the rapidly changing bodies of pubescent girls, not music and fashion.

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