Young people often feel the pressure to fit in the picture of predefined stereotypes of sexiness. The result: They start to doubt themselves if they can’t mirror these expectations. All this makes it difficult to grow up with a confident attitude towards sex and sexiness. So the idea was to make young people smart about what sexiness really means.

YouTube and its skippable ads were used as the primary activation platform. Stereotypes and censorships were used as a hook only to reframe it afterwards. The “Smart is Sexy” idea was continued on Facebook – using the Silent-Autoplay to their advantage. Users got interested in the video by seeing the universal gesture for “small penis”. By clicking on the video and turning on the sound they found out the truth about what the girls really where talking about. The ads were played for several months on YouTube and Facebook to young people from 16 to 25 for each local ANSELL brand.

Tier 2:

- Growth of unaided brand awareness after campaign in US: +5%

- Increase of qualitative brand image items (trust, safety, a brand for me etc.) after campaign in US: +7%

- post click rate of more than 9% on Facebook - three times more than the category average

- average view time on YouTube of more than 30 seconds – twice as long as the category average for

YouTube ads

Tier 3:

(year-to-year comparison)

- Value growth in Brazil during the campaign period: + 25%

- Volume MS growth in Brazil during the campaign period: + 4%

The campaign was a huge global success what these figures confirm. And with millions of views and thousands of comments in all social networks ANSELL started a conversation amongst young men and women about what really matters when it comes to sexiness.

Because ANSELL started a conversation and changed the perspective about what really matters when it comes to sex and sexiness. To accomplish this, the campaign used the disadvantage of the Facebook Silent-Autoplay-function to an unseen media advantage. Furthermore the YouTube PreRoll-Ads were used in a different way to increase the audiences attention. This was done by the use of different stereotypes and censorships in the first five seconds as a hook only to reframe them afterwards.

The “Smart is Sexy” campaign questions todays society when it comes to the values of sex and sexuality. The campaign brings back confidence to young people by encouraging them to embrace sexiness in different forms like intelligence, confidence, open-mindedness and more.

When it comes to sex and sexuality, barely anything is more connected to clichés and prejudices. Advertising, art, literature and society offer stereotypes, which give young people a false picture about what matters when it comes to sex and sexiness. ANSELL – one of the global, leading condom manufactures wanted to bring back confidence to young people that just started their sexual journey.