If you want to sell condoms, obviously you will somehow try to encourage your audience to have more sex and use condoms to avoid the unwanted. And till date, companies have been doing that either focus on the extreme pleasure of sex in advertising or telling people about the functionality of their product and how their product can enhance the joy of sex.
But Ecuador-based ad agency, Renato Designs, has decided to try something new for the condom ad campaign of its client DUO, an international condom company.
The ad agency has used the three well-known personalities in the world- Osama Bin laden, Pablo Escobar, and Nicolas Maduro, and termed them as monsters with one being still hated by almost all over the world. The ad campaign uses the tagline- “You don’t know what you could bring to the world”.
Karthik Srinivasan, a communication consultant, posted on Twitter,
A pretty bold concept for Condom advertising, by Ecuador-based ad agency Renatto Designs. Condom advertising usually focuses on pleasure, avoiding pregnancy and the sheer joy of sex. This one takes the avoiding pregnancy positioning to a new, bizarre high… to insinuate that 1/4 pic.twitter.com/xmlnYh8qJK
— Karthik 🇮🇳 (@beastoftraal) December 21, 2019
Karthik Srinivasan wrote “A pretty bold concept for Condom advertising, by Ecuador-based ad agency Renatto Designs. Condom advertising usually focuses on pleasure, avoiding pregnancy and the sheer joy of sex. This one takes the avoiding pregnancy positioning to a new, bizarre high… to insinuate that 1/4
2/4 you *may* bring a monster into the world, by mistake. This flies in the face the fact that no child becomes a monster (later in life) because of birth, but because of upbringing and exposure. And even more interesting, one of the 3 characters listed as a monster is still
3/4 alive, one country away from Ecuador where this ad was released (with only Colombia between the 2 countries) – the controversial President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro! The other 2 are, of course, world-famous for all the wrong reasons – terrorist Osama Bin Laden and
4/4 Colombian drug lord and narcoterrorist Pablo Escobar, who has since been adequately deified by the Netflix series, Narcos.
The campaign breaks common trend followed by most condom brand campaigns of either focusing on the functionality of the product or the sexual intimacy between couples. And it also refuses to advertise condoms as a means for family planning, which is quite popular in a country like India.
This creative ad campaign by DUO brings something fresh to the table, but its controversial aspect of using Nicolas Maduro, president of Venezuela, may attract some criticism.