COOP is an Italian supermarket chain which, for the first time ever, decided to launch its own private label condoms, specifically targeted at young adults. Sexual education is not a hot topic trend anymore, at the same time youngsters are taking risks every day when having un-protected sex. So how could we create an educational message powerful enough to launch this new range? Education is not sexy but humour is. So we decided to create a virus to beat another virus and came up with a contagious social campaign starting from the product name itself: Fallo Protetto, literally meaning “Do it Safe” but also meaning “Protected Penis”, thus containing an educational message. We transformed it into #falloprotetto and created some ironic content on safe sex inviting users to create their own. This has been the most useful contagion ever, because in just one month we reached the same sales figures as market leaders.

The campaign had an implementation phase started on November 8th, involving blog influencers that discussed of the product for two weeks generating content about Falloprotetto and sexual education. On December the 1st the main launch was held on social media, TV, magazines, radio. It involved Italy’s main print press reaching all the Italians with 33 pages from December 1st to the 31th December 2014. The radio campaign was on air on the main Italian radio stations with 774 radio on air from 26th November to 16th December. MTV channel broadcasted 162 commercials from November 26th to December 31st. All this was supported by digital PR, blog influencers and the Jackal, famous italian youtubers. We launched the hashtag #falloprotetto that generated content among young people on the main social media platforms.

During the campaign, Coop sold 10.000 pieces in one month. This was a strong result, because this data is aligned with the market leaders, who have dominated the condom market for a long time. We also saw a gain in terms of popularity. 34.000 Facebook users interacted with our messages on the first day of the campaign: our posts registered a double click rate compared to benchmarks for similar campaigns. The Jackall videos were shared many times among young people, thanks to their funny and sarcastic language, obtaining a much higher number of views than we expected. The initial Coop target was 150.000 but during the campaign we got a very unexpected return: 8,3 million views for the video “Things that killed sex”.