Adam Freeland’s got a new video (below) for a new track (Undercontrol) off a new album (Cope) with a new band (Freeland). Check it out.
And Relax. Nothing is under control:
Plus, check out the accompanying site: unitedwecope.com, which offers a forum for coping with modern life’s tricky dilemmas, such as:
(* bonus points to anyone who can spot the Kucoon Designs all up in that video).
Just a quick post to let you know our new Google overlords must have officially arrived, according to this ad:
Taking over from the exiting party which has heretofore been responsible for bestowing the bless-age, and to whom all unanswered questions had previously been directed, the new ephemeral, universal, entity that apparently has $5,000-a-month jobs for ye that ask to receive, will forthwith be G-ogle.
Also, the Singularity is here.
You’ll be getting an email.
The use of religious language (particularly next to the image), was perhaps deliberately intended to appeal to consumers for whom religious faith is a big, defining aspect of their identity, and for whom this kind of messaging could therefore make the ad specifically relevant. I don’t know what the statistics are on Christian stay-at-home moms, but I imagine the numbers would make this approach worthwhile.
(Ironically, if we’re gonna get biblical, the first Commandment is actually all about God insisting that there’s only one of him, and in case it wasn’t clear, Commandment #2 is basically, “and ye best not forget it.”)
Anyway… who’s got ideas for how we can rebrand Saturnalia…
A few months ago I’d written a post called How Not To Use Condoms, about the misstep of Trojan’s “Evolve” campaign.
Here, then, is Durex’s take on how to advertise condoms, courtesy of Fitzgerald & Co:
And I’d actually been planning a more substantial entry to be the first post of 2009, but when I came across this last night, I couldn’t not write about it. I think the ad is brilliant in SO many ways, and the difference between Trojan’s “Evolve” and Durex’s “Get It On” approaches to marketing condoms could not be more glaring.
It’s more than just that the tag-line “Get it on” is a damn clever double entendre (in one smooth maneuver intimating that getting *it* on, and getting a condom on, actually mean the same thing!) whereas “Evolve,” as I’d written before, aligns condoms with a phenomenon that half of Americans are in opposition to (aka: Evolution)…. It’s that this is SERIOUSLY funny!
I didn’t even realize it until I saw the Get it On ad, but Evolve is really quite humorless, isn’t it? Granted it’s hard to be funny when you’re dealing with STD’s–and, to be fair, the Evolve radio spots do manage a bit of wit in dealing with the subject. With Durex, though, funny is the key.
Both brands are trying to un-taboo their product. One of the specific goals of the Evolve campaing is, in fact, to get all of us to be more open about the topic of sexual health. But while Trojan stakes out Public Service Announcement territory, Durex is going about it in a way that I guess can be described as tongue-in-cheek porn. Of course, the dire gravity of the sexual health crisis truly cannot be underestimated, and perhaps this is why the feat of being able to position sexual responsibility–which is what condoms stand for, basically–in the context of playfulness and silliness and…..naughty condom-balloon animals, is that much more significant.
Humor makes the subject infinitely less taboo than invoking Evolution, and not only that, but it makes it more resonant too. After all, despite however it is you feel about the process of natural selection, if you get what the naughty balloon animals are up to, then the ad is speaking to you.
(P.S. Whoever did the sound design for this spot should seriously get some kind of award.)
I know the Trojan “Evolve” Campaign has been going on for a while now, but just recently something occurred to me that I hadn’t quite realized about it before.
The campaign started out last June, with the premiere of a commercial featuring women being hit on by a bar full of anthropomorphized pigs. It’s only when one of the pigs finally shuffles off to the men’s room, and purchases a condom, that he is transformed into a hot guy, and returns to the girl he was chatting up to find that she’s now suddenly totally interested in him.
In addition to the ad, whose message at the end reads: “Evolve. Use a condom every time,” the campaign also includes a website, evolveoneevolveall.com, driven by celebrity and user-generated videos dealing with the subject of sexual health, the Trojan Evolve National Tour, a mobile, experiential campaign “Raising awareness and stimulating dialogue about America’s sexual health in towns and campuses across the country,” radio ads that deal with STDs as Christmas gifts (“How about Herpes? It’s the gift that keeps on giving.” / “Would you like Chlamydia wrapped?” / “No, I’ll give it to her unwrapped.”) and more. All of this, hinging on the word “Evolve.”
“Evolve is a wake-up call to change attitudes about using condoms and, on a larger scale, the way we think and talk about sexual health in this country,” said Jim Daniels, Trojan’s VP of marketing. As Andrew Adam Newman pointed out in the New York Times piece, “Pigs With Cellphones, but No Condoms,” the campaign is an evolution for Trojan itself:
While Mr. Daniels does not disparage the company’s double-entendre-heavy “Trojan Man” campaign from the 1990s or similar Trojan Tales Web site today, the tone of the company’s promotions is moving away from “Beavis and Butthead” and toward “Sex and the City.”
“The ‘Evolve’ ad does a nice job of being humorous, but it’s also a serious call to action,” Mr. Daniels said. “The pigs are a symbol of irresponsible sexual behavior, and are juxtaposed with the condom as a responsible symbol of respect for oneself and one’s partner.”
Newman suggest that “The perennial challenge for Trojan and its competitors is the perception that [condoms] are unpleasant to use.” But I think, for a company that, according to A. C. Nielsen Research, has 75 percent of the condom market (Durex is second with 15 percent, LifeStyles third with 9 percent), Trojan oughtta have really known better than that.
“Over the last few years conservative groups in President Bush’s support base have declared war on condoms,” wrote Nicholas D. Kristof, in an opinion piece, also in the New York Times:
I first noticed this campaign last year, when I began to get e-mails from evangelical Christians insisting that condoms have pores about 10 microns in diameter, while the AIDS virus measures only about 0.1 micron. This is junk science (electron microscopes haven’t found these pores), but the disinformation campaign turns out to be a far-reaching effort to discredit condoms, squelch any mention of them in schools and discourage their use abroad.
Then there are the radio spots in Texas: ”Condoms will not protect people from many sexually transmitted diseases.”
A report by Human Rights Watch quotes a Texas school official as saying: ”We don’t discuss condom use, except to say that condoms don’t work.”
Last month at an international conference in Bangkok, U.S. officials demanded the deletion of a recommendation for ”consistent condom use” to fight AIDS and sexual diseases. So what does this administration stand for? Inconsistent condom use?
Kristof was posing this question back in 2003, while he could still add, “So far President Bush has not fully signed on to the campaign against condoms, but there are alarming signs that he is clambering on board.”
In the now almost six years since, the very subject of contraception has become as politicized as abortion, and the emphasis on condoms’ ineffectiveness has become a standard component of Abstinence-Only sex education. (You knew about that, right?) It’s even begun to affect mass media. In a written response to Trojan about why they would not air the pigs-with-cell-phones ad, Fox (which had aired prior Trojan ads) said “Contraceptive advertising must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy.” CBS refused to air it, too, and didn’t even offer further comment. Meanwhile, as paid advertising for condoms is being turned away, in the past few months I’ve seen at least two TV shows where characters made a point of mentioning that condoms don’t work: Fringe, and The Practice–a show about DOCTORS for cryin’ out loud! (Clearly, “First do no harm” must not apply to the practice of TV medicine.)
As a teenager of the 90’s, I’ve never known a world where AIDS didn’t exist, and where condoms were anything but an unequivocal necessity for “safe sex” (also a 90’s-ism that seems to no longer be in use, replaced instead by the millennial “sexual health crisis”). Sure, no one was going around preaching that condoms are 100% fail-proof, but in the decade when Magic Johnson and Greg Louganis both came out as HIV-positive, I can’t imagine any TV program deliberately broadcasting (or being allowed to get away with it), the kind of message that says, “Condoms don’t work. So why bother using them at all?”
As of 2006 the birth rate among 15 to 19 year-olds in the United States has risen for the first time since 1991 (that was the year of Johnson’s announcement). While teenage sex rates have risen since 2001, condom use has dropped since 2003. In other words, more teenagers are having more sex, and using less and less condoms in the process. But then, Jamie Lynn Spears or Bristol Palin could have told you that.
And so it is we find ourselves in a situation where Church & Dwight—the consumer products company that owns Trojan—is taking on what should have been the responsibility of the Department of Health and Human Services. Teenage or not, the U.S. apparently has the highest rates of unintended pregnancy (three million per year) and sexually transmitted infections (19 million per year) of any Western nation. (What the fuck?!)
“Right now in the U.S. only one in four sex acts involves using a condom,” Says Daniels. “Our goal is to dramatically increase use.” Then what in God’s name convinced the Kaplan Thaler Group, the New York advertising agency that created the “Evolve” campaign, that aligning condoms with evolution was the way to go about achieving this?
Cuz here’s the thing: The majority of Americans do not believe in evolution!
(CRAP!)
In fact, according to 2006 research in Science Magazine, out of 33 European countries where peolpe were asked to respond “true”, “false”, or “whuuuu?” to the statement: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals,” the only country that scored lower on belief in evolution than the US is Turkey (Also what the fuck?!)
Disturbing as this unfortunate reality may be, this is the contemporary American Landscape, and pushing Trojan as “Helping America evolve, one condom at a time,” in the face of it, seems ludicrous.
Hell, why not just call the campaign “Darwin’s theory of contraception,” while you’re at it?
The biggest threat to condoms is not the perception that they don’t feel good. It’s not even condom fatigue. The biggest threat to condoms is the Christian Right’s propaganda that they don’t work, and the government’s, and much of media’s, wholehearted complicity. And it’s the same people who are waging a war on contraception that don’t like Evolution either. I don’t know about the ultimate impact that the Evolve campaign is effecting (or not), but in my view, if, as Daniels says, Trojan’s focus is on growing the market beyond the–pardon the irony here–already converted, and getting more people to use condoms, I think a completely different slogan/campaign theme would be the way to go.
This is tripping me out. I was just going to write a quick post about how terrifically lame I think the outdoor ads for The Day The Earth Stood Still are. It’s basically just a stock-photo image of the Earth’s curvature, against a black outer-space backdrop, with big, block-y, white letters that read: “THEY’RE HERE. WE’RE GONE.”
I keep envisioning some situation where it’s like, they actually had some really kick-ass, slick-style design, and a tag-line that wasn’t written by Tarzan, but it was so high-concept and mind-blowing that it got stuck in endless rounds of focus groups, and approvals and whatnot, and as everyone was scrambling around, the deadline to get the final ad design to wherever it is that billboards and bus-wraps get printed was fast approaching, until it was only, like, minutes away, and finally some executive at 20th Century Fox got some assistant to open up MS-Paint and just slap the thing together, and clicked “Send.”
It’s so unimaginative and uninspired, and so blatant its sheer simplicity actually makes it totally meaningless. 1996 called, it wants its rejected Independence Day poster design back. In fact, so do I Robot, I am Legend, and a bunch of other future/apocalypse Will Smith movies. For that matter, every aliens/robots/zombies/mutants/monsters movie, ever, does too. At a time when our options for global crisis threats could not feel any less extra-terrestrial or non man-made, this just seems so irrelevant. Especially for a movie where the alien looks and talks exactly like Keanu Reeves, and says totally climate-crisis-compliant stuff like, “If the Earth dies, you die. If you die, the Earth survives.”
There! Look! That could have been such a better tag-line. I mean, anything could, really.
This ad is such a boring disaster that no one has even bothered to take a photo of it, or scan it or upload it or anything. It’s actually almost impossible to find any image of its lameness online anywhere.
Almost.
What you CAN find, however, is this:
Right on the heels of my previous post, about the Death Race/alcohol ad “PSA” for “Race,” this one mashes up The Day The Earth Stood Still with 90210, and is just as awesome! Not to mention, packs a message that’s actually relevant in the 21st century.
Well played, billboard mashup artist.
Ps. In the previous post, I was speculating that this kind of thing couldn’t be an accident. I am now completely convinced.
Billboard mashup is so the new street art. Word.
