Trojan Makes Concessions to Place a Suggestive Ad
By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
Published: September 27, 2010
TROJAN, the condom brand, has had its share of run-ins with censors, most notably in 2007, when both Fox and CBS rejected a commercial with a safe-sex message that featured anthropomorphized pigs. Now Trojan is introducing a vibrator called Tri-Phoria, and it says a new commercial is actually drawing less resistance than it had expected.
A Tri-Phoria ad does not use the word “vibrator” or show the product, as part of the effort to ease concerns at cable networks.
Trojan says it thought the spot would most likely be relegated to the wee hours, but some cable networks, including Comedy Central, Spike and VH1, have approved it for day and early evening slots — and none have rejected it outright. A Tri-Phoria commercial has run since early September during the day and early evening, for example, on Comedy Central, appearing during “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report” and “South Park.”
For a smaller vibrator, the Mini, which Trojan introduced in 2009, cable networks restricted commercials to an average window of just five hours after midnight, said Kierie Courtney, senior manager of direct response marketing at Church & Dwight, which owns the Trojan brand.
With the Tri-Phoria, which sells for $40, “one of our key goals was around the acceptance and mainstreaming of the product category,” Ms. Courtney said.
For the first time, Trojan showed storyboards of prospective ads to representatives from cable networks this year, toning ads down to assuage concerns, and they said that as a result the average window for the new spot was 11 hours. But the concessions that Trojan consented to were considerable: it agreed to neither use the word “vibrator” nor show the product.
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“Has life got you stressed out?” begins a voiceover in the commercial, in an over-the-top style of an infomercial, as a woman sits stuck in traffic. “Want to have some fun? New from Trojan, a brand you trust. Introducing vibrating Tri-Phoria — it’s like three massagers in one.”
The new commercial, by Sullivan Productions of Tampa, Fla., calls the product a “personal massager.” Borrowing a trope from pharmaceutical commercials, it continues, “Side effects of Tri-Phoria may include screams of ecstasy, curled toes, a sudden glow and intense waves of pleasure.”
In “The Technology of Orgasm,” a history of the vibrator, Rachel P. Maines writes that in the early 1900s the devices were advertised in women’s magazines and the Sears catalog, albeit obliquely as relaxation aids, and it was not until they started appearing in stag films in the 1920s that, as Ms. Maines puts it, their “social camouflage” was undone and such ads disappeared.
Asked to review the new Tri-Phoria commercial, Ms. Maines said it “comes very close to telling you what it is good for” without quite doing so.
“The camouflage used to be a lot thicker, but there’s still a very thin layer of camouflage,” she said. “The networks have moved to where they’re resigned to accept some sort of advertising — but they still require a fig leaf held up with suspenders.”
Brian Fays, executive vice president for advertising at MTV, which is owned by Viacom, lauded Trojan’s restraint.
“No matter how liberal you are, a little kid doesn’t need to hear the word ‘vibrator,’ ” said Mr. Fays, who knows about advertising decisions by other Viacom networks that accepted the Tri-Phoria commercial, like Comedy Central, Logo and Spike.
“At first there was a certain amount of trepidation that maybe the viewing public wasn’t prepared to see a commercial with vibrators, and we automatically put it in the overnight slot, but we opened it up because, instead of it being taboo, they got their point across subtly,” he said.
MTV, in fact, is among the most restrictive of the cable networks, permitting the Tri-Phoria spot only between 3:30 a.m. and 6 a.m., which Mr. Fays attributed to the network’s having a “younger demographic.” But if the commercial has “smooth sailing” during earlier slots on other Viacom networks, MTV may permit it to be seen in earlier time slots too, he said.
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Not everyone views television networks’ greater acceptance of ads of a sexual nature as a victory. On Monday, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a policy statement urging, among other things, that ads for erectile dysfunction drugs like Viagra be shown only after 10 p.m. and “not be overly suggestive.”
Trojan says the Tri-Phoria campaign represents the largest advertising campaign for a vibrator, and that the company is spending “millions” on it, but declines to be more specific. The Trojan brand spent a total of $22.4 million on advertising (most of it focused on condoms) in 2009, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP.
Market research companies that follow a variety of consumer goods do not track the vibrator market, but research by Trojan pegs annual revenue for the devices in the United States at about $1 billion, 2.5 times that of condoms.
According to Trojan-financed studies published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, 52.5 percent of women and 44.8 percent of men have used vibrators. Contrary to the perception that the devices are nearly always used by the unaccompanied, 40.9 percent of women and 40.5 percent of men report having used them with sexual partners.
Men made 40 percent of the online purchases of the Mini and the Touch, two small vibrators Trojan introduced in the last two years. In 2009 it focused on men with ads in Maxim for the Mini.
Jim Daniels, vice president for marketing at Trojan, said the restrained approach of the ad on cable networks would increase the likelihood of eventually gaining approval for the commercials on the major broadcast networks.
“Our goal is with facts and experience on our side to approach networks for approval, possibly in the early part of next year,” Mr. Daniels said.
He says that although Tri-Phoria is available only on Trojan’s Web site now, he expects it to be carried at major retailers like CVS, Walgreen’s and Wal-Mart beginning in the first half of 2011.
“This is right in Trojan’s wheelhouse,” he said. “We think we’re creating a good buzz — pun intended — and we think consumers will be happy with the products we’re offering.”
A version of this article appeared in print on September 28, 2010, on page B4 of the New York edition.
