Bar full of Trojan ad execs?
After visiting the beds of universities across the nation, Trojan Condoms has come out with its annual Sexual Health Report Card.
The report, available on the Trojan website, evaluated 139 schools based on “the availability of sexual health resources and information” for students.
Fortunately, Penn ranks fairly high, coming in 21st. You may now go forth and spread your seed confident that you have plenty of resources on campus to help in case you get syph.
While the information that Trojan’s research provides is helpful for increasing sexual health awareness, more interesting to me was the section entitled “America is not a Sexually Healthy Nation.” My interest does not lie in the content of this section but in the purpose of including this section in the report card.
“America is not a sexually healthy nation” because we get a lot of STDs compared to other industrialized nations, get pregnant during our teen years and have lots and lots of unprotected sex. Singles alone (hah) participated in one billion unprotected sex sessions.
The literature goes on to describe Trojan’s Evolve Campaign (if you haven’t seen the ads, they’re pretty clever) which attempts to create a dialog about the scary condition of sexual America.
But increasing awareness about the risks inherent in having sex implies one outstanding benefit for Trojan: increased condom sales.
While Trojan is increasing awareness about a critical social issue, they are also acting on the fears of consumers in order to increase sales. Granted, I definitely feel safer for my friends and for myself knowing that more sexually active youth will be armed with protection, but I also feel a little manipulated.
Trojan could have decided, after all, to increase awareness about sex trafficking or some other issue that does not have a direct effect on their sales.
In the end however, being manipulated is definitely a much better feeling than, well, being itchy.
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October 5th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
ABBBBBBBY! You would talk about Trojan condoms hahaha and I loved your last line:
“In the end however, being manipulated is definitely a much better feeling than, well, being itchy.”
too funny, lauren and i are laughing about it during our study break right now
October 7th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
[...] a press release that they hope will get picked up on blogs like this one. Mission accomplished! Penn ranks 21, behind Columbia, Cornell and Brown, but ahead of Harvard and Yale. We’re not sure what the [...]