Condom Ads Lighten Up

Makers Shift Focus From Aids Scare

Nineteen months ago Ansell-Americas, a maker of health-care products, ushered in a new era in condom marketing with an advertising campaign that was as scary as it was straightforward.

``I`ll do a lot for love, but I`m not ready to die for it,`` a sober woman said in the ads for the company`s Lifestyles condoms.

Next month a dramatically different Lifestyles campaign will be introduced.

In one television spot, a man in a black cape and mask approaches a counter.

``Hi, Phantom,`` a saleswoman says.

``Taking a date to the opera?``

``Yes,`` he answers, ``and I need Lifestyles.``

To which the woman nonchalantly replies, ``But you didn`t have to wear that mask to ask for them.``

Ansell`s shift from solemnity to humor in its advertising is part of a broad transformation in condom marketing.

Though sales have risen dramatically with the spread of AIDS, manufacturers say they have fallen short of expectations.

As a result several companies are dropping the scare tactics and explicit references to AIDS and starting to market condoms the way they would market most other packaged goods.

The new approaches include the following:

- More niche marketing, aimed at groups including Hispanics, blacks and women, and at groups defined by lifestyles, including ``more responsible``

consumers and homosexuals.

For example, in a recent trade promotion, Carter-Wallace Inc., manufacturer of Trojan, the industry leader with a market share of nearly 57 percent, featured photographs of the company`s eight brands, with the headline, ``There`s a Trojan latex condom specially designed for each of your customers` preferences.``

The brands include a new one for female buyers and two with a drug intended to prevent the transmission of AIDS.

- Use of conventional packaged-goods promotional techniques.

``When buying condoms, you can`t put a price on protection. But you can get $1 off,`` reads an advertisement for Mentor condoms that began in June in five urban newspapers and included a coupon redeemable at drugstores.

- A lightening of tone in advertising, some of which borders on the vaudevillian.

The forthcoming national cable television campaign for Lifestyles, created by the New York ad agency Lois Pitts Gershon Pon/GGK, features actors portraying Robin Hood and ``Azania of the Jungle`` in addition to the Phantom, with the theme line, ``It`s a matter of condom sense.``

``We`re out to make buying a condom less embarrassing,`` said John Silverman, president of Ansell-Americas, a unit of Pacific Dunlop Ltd., an Australian company.

The condom industry has increased its ad spending to perhaps $10 million annually from about $250,000 a year in the early 1980s, according to Leading National Advertisers, an independent market-research service.

Carter-Wallace more than doubled its expenditures last year, to $2.3 million.

In the first quarter of this year, supermarket sales of condoms, the fastest-growing retail segment, continued to expand at this rate, and Salomon Brothers predicts that total sales will grow by 20 percent a year for five years.

But condom manufacturers consider this expansion sluggish.

``If you figure that in the past, 6 percent of the population used condoms as their primary form of birth control, and that sales are growing by 20 percent a year, then the reach into the population base is still very small,`` said Alfred Mannino, vice president of sales and marketing for the Mentor Corp., a Minneapolis biomedical-products company.

Surveys indicate that women buy 25 percent to 40 percent of condoms, leading several companies to create brands directed at women.

Trojan for Women follows Mentor, introduced as a women`s brand in 1986.

Last year, Schmid, a subsidiary of London International Group (which produces Ramses and Sheik and which accounts for about 30 percent of the U.S. market), introduced Koromex, an extension of a women`s contraceptive brand name.

Still, a survey released last month by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a private family-planning research organization in New York, indicated that a mere 12 percent of American women rely on condoms, up only 3 percentage points since 1982.

Many marketing people think the dark tone of the condom ads that first hit mainstream publications and local television stations in early 1987 may have repelled consumers.

In large part, this approach was dictated by the publishing companies and television stations, which required a public-health theme and which prohibited advertising condoms as contraceptive devices.

Most still do.

``We accept condom advertising, provided the emphasis is on the prevention of disease,`` said Robert Smith, advertising-acceptability manager of The New York Times.

The Times, Newsweek and Time dropped their prohibition of condom advertising early last year in accepting the AIDS-focused Lifestyles ad.