https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd7ZUmbEJ7s
This video has been one of the most popular in France through Facebook. The French Website, Stratégie, specialized in marketing information, has mentionned it as one of the best in 2010. The Parisian advertising agency TWBA created this add for Aides, the French association against HIV/AIDS.
I know, this video is crude. You don’t have to find a hidden meaning, to read between the line. At the end of the clip, you have exactly undersood the message: ” Put a condom to have sex”. But the aim of this video is obviously to give an other meaning to the product: condom is sexy. If you don’t use it, nobody is going to have sexual relationship with you (The true menaing is that it is dangerous, true but still !).
What is interesting in this ad is that it refers to a human behaviour that is a public issue in a lot of countries. But here, the genital parts, male and female are the characters. It allows everyone to think about its own experience without having to identify, or not, with the actual characters.
The place where the seen takes place (public bathrooms) is the best way to target a huge number of people through this ad. Indeed, few people has never experienced public bathrooms,with the walls full of graffitis and drawings more or less suggestive (well, maybe it’s different in Canada, but trust me, it’s pretty commun in Europe to find this kind of “decoration”).
Finally, the music is one of the corner stone of the video since it gives perfectly well the pace to the story.
For me, this ad is briliant because it introduce poetry in a place where poetry is not commun and it only helps people thiking about the condom, without imposing random faces on a particular behaviour.