The music evolution

Find your rubber soul

Trojan Condoms Evolve campaign – aiming to build awareness amongst Americans about the need to wear a condom – is making its move on music.

The campaign has so far featured TV spots with non-condom users depicted as ‘un-evolved’ pigs. In addition to the commercials, Trojan has sponsored two tours, taking an interactive bus across America to the Vans Warped Tour and to political conventions.

Musicians are now being asked to create a short-form video or musical track that can inspire social change. The only stipulation is that the creative content must promote the key message – “Evolve. Use a condom every time”.

Grants for the programme range from $3,000 to $4,000, and projects that are funded will be placed online on a site that is being created in conjunction with MTV. Work may also be included in future Trojan advertisements.

So what?: “Sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,” goes the old adage. Condom Essential Wear gave away free condoms at Bestival in 2007 and Durex ran its ‘Think Contraception’ campaign at the Oxegen festival this year – handing out 30,000 tins containing info and festival maps.

Trojan took inflatable waterslides, a condom tent showing a movie about safe sex, Hooters girls, and DJs to US college campuses this year – taking the festival experience to the user’s door. The grants are a neat extension (excuse the pun) of this; however, the unavoidable restrictions placed on creative submissions in the T&Cs are still subject to an age old advertising problem (how to talk about sex, without being explicit). Which, frankly, rules out virtually every aspiring hip-hop act.

“‘Un-evolved pigs’ sounds about right, but I’d assume that trying to point anything out to an un-evolved pig would prove tricky. Our recent government campaign was along the right lines (except they failed to list HIV among the STIs). Perhaps if Trojan just showed people pictures of un-evolved pigs covered in crabs, genital warts and such, it would hit home harder and save a lot of money.”
Chantelle Fiddy, Editor Ctrl. Alt.Shift

www.trojancondoms.com