Kaplan Thaler Group

Kaplan Thaler for Trojan.

The "Evolve" campaign for Trojan arose from an interesting market landscape and even more interesting consumer insight. At the time, Trojan was a dominant player in the condom market, but they were having trouble growing the brand and condom sales; the goal was simply to get couples to use condoms more. So Kaplan Thaler set out to discover the situation surrounding when and how a person chooses that kind of "partner" and uses a condom. The insight they discovered is pretty amusing; research concluded that when selecting a partner, "men want to be chosen and she wants to be choosy." It gets better though; they also found that a condom can even be viewed as "a symbol of worthiness." What? Kaplan Thaler's insight on this makes men and women seem selfish and shallow, but those are the conclusions they came to after working with a cultural anthropologist and clinical psychologist to examine condoms from a cultural, social, and biological perspective. The campaign that resulted reflects the idea of evolution and hence, the pigs.

When working with a...mature product like condoms, everyone involved in the advertising process for the product has to be extra careful about media restrictions like time, place, and manner. The restrictions can make media buying and placement, as well as the concepting, more difficult. When Kaplan Thaler submitted their spot "Pigs" to different broadcast networks, they claim they knew it would be rejected. It was rejected. Following the rejection, Trojan got a ton of buzz in the media and among consumers, which helped raise awareness for the brand despite the lack of air time. Unfortunately for media and broadcast stations, it is not unusual for commercials or ads that get banned from TV to end up getting more attention from free publicity anyway.