Rubber Pitches
Before It's Too Late, produced for Ansell Inc. by Tom Eppley of Red Bank, N.J.
One Night Stand, Two Weeks Later, produced for Ansell Inc. by Stu Pollard of Los Angeles.
Forget Me Not, produced for Ansell Inc. by Rick Starbuck of Santa Barbara, Calif.
Each year, Ansell Inc., the makers of LifeStyles condoms, conducts a condom ad contest that anyone can enter--PR firm or individual, amateur or professional. Then the company broadcasts the winners as its television advertising campaign, or tries to air the ads themselves. MTV and the Comedy Channel routinely run the spots, but most network affiliates outside three markets (Boston, Seattle, and Chico, Calif.) have refused so far to show them.
Under federal law, broadcasters can't censor ads for political candidates, but everything else--from soap to the nuttiest issue ad campaign--must meet the stations' amorphous standards of accuracy and good taste. So most of the ads you see on television, believe it or not, are certified as true, defensible, and tasteful. Presumably the condom ads aren't false--the product does work; they fail on grounds of taste.
This year's first-prize winner, Before It's Too Late, was created by a truck driver whose hobby is computer animation. A talking skeleton holding a LifeStyles condom in bony fingers confides that he never used a condom because he was "too embarrassed to ask for them from behind the counter," and because he'd "feel awkward stopping in the middle of everything just to put this on." He continues: "But then lately, I don't feel a thing."
Even before the advent of AIDS, sex was equated with death. Before It's Too Late updates and exploits this cultural assumption, letting the viewer play with the horror of sex and death without really confronting it. The words aren't explicit, but the message is: "Use a condom, and you won't die."
Robert Shrum is a leading Democratic political consultant. His deconstruction of ads is a weekly feature of Slate.