Love distance

Other people’s relationships are always good value for a bit of armchair voyeurism, especially when it gives you an insight into how the other half thinks. And that’s why I love this campaign for a the Japanese condom manufacturer Sagami (spotted by the ever-watchful Natalie).

The campaign was called Love Distance and there’s a video explaining it all here. But in short, the basic problem was that it’s hard to advertise condoms in Japan, which sounds slightly unbelievable given the extreme masochism involved in half of their gameshows. Anyway, Sagami produce the world’s thinnest condom (0.02mm in case you’re interested), and stuck an ad in a paper looking for genuine long-distance lovers.

They found a couple and then streamed 24/7 videos of them as they travelled the 1,000km between their homes. And this is where the clever bit kicks in. Using a beautifully new-media terminology called ‘blind branded entertainment‘, there was never any mention of who was behind the site or what it was supposed to be advertising.

When users logged on, they could only access either the male or the female site (depending on their gender). There were polls, webcams, blogs etc. all dedicated to and contributed to by one gender only. And it wasn’t until the couple actually met that all was revealed.

Running for about a month, it was quite a long campaign, but I think it was executed so beautifully that it doesn’t really matter. I have no idea about how successful it was in terms of stats, posts, dwell times, interactions, PR coverage etc. but I hope it did well.