Yes. Those stick people are doing what you think they’re doing. For its AIDS awareness group clients – Action Séro Zéro and COCQ-Sida (la Coalition des organismes communautaires québécois de lutte contre le sida) – Montreal-based Marketel crafted a cheeky safe sex campaign to tie in with the city’s first Outgames. The event was sort of a gay Olympics that attracted more than 250,000 visitors from around the world in late July.
Saucy print executions, which ran in local papers and magazines as well as wild postings, featured phallic-looking sports equipment such as badminton birdies and baseball bats with the tag ‘Equipped for the Games?’ And a 30-second animated spot depicting two stick figures engaged in explicit sporty sexual relations, set against a condom-wrapper backdrop, ran on giant screens around the games. Posters featuring the sexy stick figures also ran in washrooms at gay bars and bathhouses.
‘Outrageous seems appropriate for an event like the Outgames,’ says Linda Dawe, senior copywriter at Marketel. ‘Our main concern was to really catch people’s attention.’ The creative team was careful to keep the campaign light to best fit the festive mood of the games. ‘We’re not trying to scare people, but the message is still pretty explicit without being heavy-handed,’ she says. ‘It’s not preachy or a downer.’ Dawe adds that her team sent storyboards of the sexy spot to RadioCanada asking if it would be interested in running it during their coverage of the Games. ‘They said ‘noooo thanks!’ she laughingly recalls.
