Hazel Friedman
`LIFE should not be cheap and love ain’t for free.” This is one of the messages behind the Lovers Plus commercial on SABC, South Africa’s first branded condom television ad. Filmed and produced in South Africa and flighted during prime time on SABC1 and 2 since June 23, the ad is the brainchild of the Society for Family Health (SFH), a non- profit NGO that uses social marketing to prevent HIV and Aids.
The society is also the leader of a consortium of South African NGOs – including the Community Agency for Social Enquiry and Soul City – that was awarded a R7-million tender for an Aids media campaign, by the Department of Health this week.
Set in a cinema, the Lovers Plus ad features a wall-to-wall muscled Rambo-type man fighting an on-screen epic battle of the bulges. The camera then cuts to a young couple snogging in the back row of the cinema. Another movie- goer, distracted by the necking sessions, remarks: “I hope they use a condom,” to which the young man replies, “Condom? I never use a condom.” At this point an outraged Rambo gets real. He somersaults through the screen, handing the startled lovers a pack of Lovers Plus condoms, and the pay-off line, “It’s your life.”
“We conducted extensive research among focus groups in order to communicate the importance of using condoms to a range of South Africans of all ages, races and sexes,” explains Mitchell Warren, director of the SFH.
Targeted primarily at disadvantaged communities, the Lovers Plus condom does not aim to compete with commercial brands like Durex. “Our aim is to focus on health issues, not profit,” says SFH communications and research manager Tyrone Shuttleworth.
Established in 1992, the SFH first began as a regional organisation in KwaZulu-Natal, working in partnership with the United States-based Population Services International. Since 1996, it has gone national and has made an extraordinary contribution to Aids awareness in the form of community radio broadcasts and radio and TV ads featuring prominent South Africans like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Baby Jake Matlala and Evita Bezuidenhout endorsing safe sex.
The Lovers Plus ad represents a first for South African television. In February this year the SFH was invited to do a five-minute insert during a documentary on Aids, screened on the trendy lifestyle programme The Works. And condom manufacturer Durex has also flighted Aids ads on television. But both were relegated to a late-night post- 10pm to placate the prissier members of SABC’s prime-time audience.
Consequently, the ads missed their principal target market, namely young teenagers. But at last, over a decade after the rest of the world began flighting TV ads about the dangers of romping without a raincoat, South African teenagers will discover during prime time that safe sex does mean using a padded headboard.