DUREX CONDOMS
When conducting research for this project I felt that creating a campaign based around plastic pollution was the thing I felt most passionately about. I wanted to focus on a small product that had a big impact on the issue and condoms were something that was brought to mind. Doing research I discovered that Polyurethane condoms, however, definitely won’t degrade, and aren’t recyclable. (Metro.co.uk, 2018).
Most condoms that I researched are made from polyurethane- all the big condom brands such as Durex, SKYN etc… use polyurethane in their condoms. In this assignment we were tasked with making a brand appear more socially conscious, and because Durex does not create condoms that are biodegradable I wanted to make the brand seem more socially aware of what they were contributing and let them voice to their customers that they need to be aware of what condoms do to the environment. I decided to do this by creating three contact points to spread across to people and get them educated on the matter.
The concept I created was ‘condoms and people that last a lifetime.’ I wanted to praise the customers by lifting up their ‘sex time’ as well as specify how long condoms take to biodegrade and eventually vanish from the planet. To get this message across I decided to go with the famous sexual innuendo ‘that’s what she said’, people often say this phrase after someone has said something that relates to something sexually.
For my print adverts I want them to be placed in places where people have to wait a long time, so either in lines for groceries (maybe even Dischem because the lines there are always long) or even on street poles on the side of the road that people can only see when they’re stuck in traffic and having to wait. The whole idea of waiting comes from the ‘lasts a lifetime’ phrase. I used the imagery of evolution to depict the print advert, because evolution took millions of years for people to become what they are today, it expresses the ‘lifetime’ I was trying to depict. The wording on the print advert is ‘that took forever’- She, this plays with the ‘that’s what she said’ saying, could be what the girlfriend says when her boyfriend takes too long to finish, could be Mother Nature saying this about condoms taking forever to decompose or the evolution process taking ‘forever.’
Then I decided to place an advert on Pornhub in between when people are watching, so the video will play for 10 seconds and then start ‘buffering’ and every five seconds different sayings will pop up while the video is ‘buffering,’ all of these saying will relate to the ‘that’s what she said’ innuendo. The association of whether a women who is having sex is saying it, someone impatiently waiting for the screen to load or is it Mother Nature complaining about condoms being disposed of in the wrong way. This whole idea of the loading thing will follow onto the social media activation, the impatient feeling will follow with how long people are going to have to wait for the picture to load, the feeling of impatience is important because that’s how long a condom takes to decompose as well as how long a Durex man lasts during sex. By using the hard hitting pay off line ‘f*** your girlfriend, not the earth,’ it gets people’s attention, people are often drawn to swear words, therefore it will draw people to read what the advert is saying and it is the most important part because it tells people what the purpose of the advert is. I think that with this campaign Durex is seen as a more socially conscious brand that understands that their condoms are bad for the environment and are speaking out about it.
This whole idea of the loading thing will follow onto the social media activation, the impatient feeling will follow with how long people are going to have to wait for the picture to load, the feeling of impatience is important because that’s how long a condom takes to decompose as well as how long a Durex man lasts during sex. By using the hard hitting pay off line ‘f*** your girlfriend, not the earth,’ it gets people’s attention, people are often drawn to swear words, therefore it will draw people to read what the advert is saying and it is the most important part because it tells people what the purpose of the advert is. I think that with this campaign Durex is seen as a more socially conscious brand that understands that their condoms are bad for the environment and are speaking out about it.