Background & context

RFSU is a Nordic organization that promotes sexual and reproductive health and rights. To fund their mission, they sell condoms, sex toys and lubricants. With global competition more active in Sweden, RFSU needed to defend their position as the market leader in the condom category. Yet, equally important, RFSU wanted to promote increased condom usage among young adults.

Creative challenge

When looking closer at the target group, we found “The Condom Gap” – a term we coined to highlight the disparity between the 69% wanting to use condoms when having sex with someone new and the 38% who make it happen. This gap is rife with mixed emotions, from lust and embarrassment to fear and desire. In short, real feelings.

None of these feelings are represented within the category or culture. Instead, the condom is made fun of and portrayed as the enemy. But it’s not how condoms smell or the feeling that they kill the vibe that’s to blame – it’s that people find it hard to talk about condoms and sex in general. So, to get more people on board with condoms, we needed to build a new story.

Solution

We created the long-term platform “Dear Condom”. A sensitive, honest and raw love/hate letter to the condom. 100% transparent about how people feel, covering both the good and bad – a concept the condom category had never seen before. Rooted in real stories, Dear Condom inspired authenticity, created a dialogue and, above all, made the condom sexy.

Execution

Using film as our main media, we gave the condom the sexy space it needed in pop culture. To make the first film honest, we based the script on interviews with 60 couples and singles of different ages. Knowing our film would be banned on social media due to its explicit content, we gathered some of Scandinavia's most influential people in the cast to ensure the campaign would get earned attention. In addition to the main film, we made 30 interview films with the cast and other famous people to spread the message and start a dialogue about using condoms.

For the second iteration, we portrayed different perspectives and captured the insecurities around intimate relationships. To highlight the importance of communication around sex, we created an interactive film based on interviews with young adults, showing the naked and unfiltered thoughts associated with sex with someone new. The main characters were a couple in real life – making the intimate meeting naturally sexy and vulnerable. To get around the social media blocking, we let artists share their “secret sex thoughts” on Instagram to break stigmas around how to think and feel when it comes to sex.

Throughout the two campaigns within the platform, our guiding star was to create content that people actually want to watch, rather than focus too much on what’s assumed to be activation best practice. Simply put, we gave this story the time it deserved. And people stayed from start to end.