Marketing sex in a PG13 world

The Durex Perfoman storyline is simple: an attractive woman from the future recruits a journalist who lives in the present day to save the world.Using magical powers, he turns into a superhero, stops the crisis, gets the girl and ends the story by saying: “Of course you can choose to go fast or slow; if it’s a happy thing, why not give yourself and the people around you more time to enjoy the moment?”For adults, the innuendo is glaringly obvious. But for those who don’t understand, Kitchen creative partner Alan Kan, hopes it just reads as “any other superhero story”.“One of the challenges is that this micro-movie is running on YouTube, where people of all ages can access,” he said.“So, despite that we’re advertising for a company whose slogan is ‘Love Sex’, the contents can’t be too explicit.”“So for this campaign, we had to make sure adults would smirk at our humour and children will just register it as a normal superhero-themed story.”Launched last Friday, the third phase of the campaign is an interactive mobile app that is paired with the TVC, which ends with the woman throwing a ring to the viewer. (The original story saw the journalist catching the ring and transforming into Performan).Viewers at home then face their phones to their television to “catch” the ring. If successful, they need to mimic Performan in the TVC and point their phones upwards to “transform”.Gifts will be mailed to their homes after successful "transformations".The first phase of faking Performan – sans the Durex logo – as an upcoming film debut in mid July. Media placements were made in cinemas and on bus and MTR stations.The second phase of print media placement of Performan with the brand logo rolled out at the end of July.“The concept of superheroes is easy to understand and relate to ‘performance’,” said Kan.“Through the three phases, we wanted to create the noise of this new figure and go viral on social media.”