Sex toy etailer Lovehoney stirred up predictable amounts of outrage in the the Daily Mail last week after its first TV ad aired on daytime TV.
Featuring a couple kissing for around 20 seconds before telling each other to have a good day, the tagline is ‘Live a sexier life’, with Lovehoney describing itself as “The sexual happiness people”.
The campaign, created by Bristol agency Halo Media, also includes print advertising in women’s magazines such as Cosmopolitan and posters.
The aim is to raise brand awareness and the amount of press coverage it has generated will no doubt help with that.
Sex toys are a difficult thing to advertise without making overt references to the products and the adverts are successfully subtle, getting its brand message across.
“It’s an intelligent way of increasing awareness,” Pete Camponi, joint creative director at advertising agency Gratterpalm, says of the ad. “They’re selling the benefits of the products – the advert shows the morning after the night before.”
The only difficulty, he adds, is that it’s not entirely clear at first whether Lovehoney is an etailer or some kind of therapy service. “It’s effective for raising brand awareness but whether it will actually sell more is a difficult question.”
TV is without a doubt still the best way of claiming a certain brand territory as your own, and Lovehoney co-founder Richard Longhurst says the campaign is a test to see how customers respond. “If it goes well, we’ll be back for more,” he says.
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