This week, we're looking at ❤️ Valentine's Day ❤️. What is the 14th of February if not a celebration of true love, romance, and commercialism?
Here's the work from Who Gives A Crap, Durex, and KFC.
1. Who Gives A Crap: Breaking Up is Hard to Do
Roses are red, violets are blue...AI just broke up with you.
Imagine getting dumped by a robot.
Now imagine getting dumped by a roll of toilet paper.
Which is worse???
Well, Who Gives A Crap reckon they know the answer. They ran a survey and found out that 29% of people are considering or are open to getting an AI to write their break-up messages when they've fallen out of love. Gotta love a weirdly specific yet not quite definitive survey result.
Anyway, this campaign centres around a dumping service. People who take part get some handy little elves employed by Who Gives A Crap to hand-write a break-up note to their partner, in celebration of the fake World Dump Day.
You have to give it to them, it's a funny pun. They are the self-proclaimed dumping experts.
It's a funny little campaign. I don't think it really hits a great note (yes, getting dumped via an AI written message is bad, but getting dumped by an eco loo roll brand is definitely worse), but the fact that the brand chose to focus on sh*tuationships is pretty funny. And it's an interesting take for Valentine's Day, to swing in the complete opposite direction. More interesting to me is the purpose of a campaign like this - D2C subscription brands' biggest challenge is retention. Delivering a more valuable, differentiated experience compared to the other near-identical players seems like a good move, but despite the pun, this campaign is so far away from what the brand actually does that I'm not sure this will have the desired effect.
2. Durex: Making Sex Beautiful
Durex make sex beautiful for V-Day.
Or did they make beauty sexy???
But it's a really fun ad, isn't it.
Durex created a mock-beauty ad to promote... sex with lube - a revolutionary product that leaves you with a real afterglow. And of course, the ad is packed to the brim naughty innuendos.
Gently taking the piss out of the beauty industry while jokingly finding a new way to position themselves for their customers is a nice strategic idea. It pulls on the sexual wellness trend really naturally, while keeping that tongue-in-cheek humour about sex that Durex have had. It's a great space and voice they've carved out for the brand, where they get to freely talk about sex in the way people do / the way people find funny.
Lube is a game-changer, yet so many people still see it as optional. At Durex we help people have better sex, and we know that lube makes every sex occasion more pleasurable.
said Durex category manager, Charlotte McCrudden. And on Valentine's Day, people are willing to try a little bit harder - and maybe more willing to do the kinds of things you see in movies (ew, no, not those movies... I mean stuff like buying a bunch of rose petals to throw across a bed...). So why not try to position lube as something you just should buy when you want really great sex?
3. KFC: Double Down on the Double Down
FINE, this isn't a Valentine's Day ad. But I couldn't find any others that I really like.
KFC's monstrosity of a sandwisch(?) is back - two bits of fried chicken acting as the bread, sandwiching a hash brown and a slice of cheese. Truly mental stuff.
But Mother have been doing some awesome, crazy work for KFC, and this is a real zinger to add to the pile.
There are a series of ads that look mysteriously like they used some AI video generation software to transform "double" things (like a bunkbed, two MMA fighters, the two '1's on a digital watch at 2:11...) into the Zinger Double Down sandwich.
Sticking with the mass hypnosis vibe from the earlier campaigns Mother and KFC launched together, this series of videos is really tied together by the pieces of guerilla OOH. I love the idea of making every single double into a reminder of this sandwich.
Now admittedly, the device works much better when you watch the videos and then immediately see the OOH - it feels like my brain is trying to fold up those two red lines into the sandwich to replicate the weird, trippy transformations.
But I still think this is a great way to announce the return of a slightly controversial menu item. Now, the fact they're bringing it back must mean that it performed fairly well commercially, but honestly, I have never met anyone who has ordered and enjoyed this thing. But the fact that it is so conceptually gross is weirdly something this campaign plays into. It's weird, a bit horrifying, but just enough to get you curious. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. Then you're seeing it everywhere. Then you're ordering it. Then you're regretting it.