Worryingly, 47% of millennials aren’t using condoms when having sex with somebody new. Scare tactics highlighting STI’s don’t work. We needed to do things differently and remind them about the bigger, life-changing consequence – an unwanted baby. Rather than hit them with more serious facts, we had to engage with them in a fun and relevant way.

We also had another challenge to overcome, Skyn were the number two or number three brand of condoms in most markets, so we needed to generate the same brand fame and awareness the market leaders have but without the huge advertising budget.

No other age group uses Facebook more than millennials, they spend 6 hours per week scrolling through their newsfeeds. But now the older generations are more connected than ever, they’re sharing more than ever too. Uploading billions of baby images onto Facebook every year.

Because messages about sexually transmitted diseases tend to be ignored, Skyn decided to inform the younger generations about the condom’s original purpose – preventing conception. So a social media platform overwhelmed with babies seemed the perfect place for a condom brand to engage with young people and prove the effectiveness of our product. All within the confines of our limited budget. However, thousands of other brands are competing for their attention on the platform, so in order to stand out we needed to utilize Facebook in a way that’s never been done before.

We brought our contraception to Facebook and created a digital tool that blocks baby photos on your newsfeed and swaps them for stuff you’re actually interested in. We named it The Baby Blocker and uploaded it to the Google Chrome Webstore. The extension cheekily hacks into Facebook’s algorithm, which identifies what is in every photo, then uses it to detect babies and remove them.

It tracks how many babies you’ve blocked in real time and lets you share the tool with all your friends. To get the world talking about it, we timed our launch with the most famous birth of the year, Prince Harry and Megan Markle’s bundle of joy. Maximising our impact and pushing The Baby Blocker beyond conventional channels.

Baby Blocker didn’t just achieve brand fame, it made a dent in culture. It was talked about on every continent from Europe, America, Australasia and beyond with a global reach of 197,000,000. Broadcast on international news and published in press around the world including The Guardian, Fox News, Elle Magazine, Mirror, Metro, Gizmodo, Yahoo!, Android, MSN. We were a hot topic on popular radio shows, podcasts and social media, and we even made it to the front page of Reddit.

Not only did the media love it, The Baby Blocker users did too, as it was downloaded in over 73 countries with thousands of loyal users blocking baby after baby. In fact, they racked up nearly a year’s worth of user time in the process, 11 months to be exact. Skyn went from an unknown brand to the condom company the world couldn’t stop talking about.