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LifeStyles' SKYN Kicks Off Global Push

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LifeStyles Condoms, a division of Ansell Healthcare Products LLC, is launching a global campaign for SKYN, its three-year-old condom line. The U.S. portion of the campaign, called “This Changes Everything,” includes television, out-of-home and digital elements, and sampling events in major U.S. cities. 

The campaign kicks off in New York this week at the Fashion Week event Style360, in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. Among other things, teams will hand out samples of the new product, which is made out of polyisoprene instead of latex.

Advertising creative for the effort, developed by London-based Blac and executed for the U.S. by Boston-based AMP, relies on testimonials and sensuality rather than overt humor, with digital and TV ads showing scantily dressed young women relating statistics and anecdotes from SKYN brand user testimonials, which the company says were gathered internationally. Examples:  “Love Sex. Hate Condoms. Love SKYN” and “It looked like a condom, but it sure didn’t feel like one.”

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Carol Carrozza, VP of global communications for Ansell Healthcare, says that even though SKYN launched in the U.S. in 2008, the time has only now arrived for a global campaign, since the rollout has been executed in stages. "It's our first global campaign, and a reflection of the company's view about marketing that some things are universal," she says, adding that the brand is in -- or will soon be in -- markets like China, Brazil, India, Australia, France and Thailand. 

She points out that the women in the ads are intended not to seem specific to any global region. "The original intent was to try to get that cross-cultural view. The irony of it is that when I look at it -- and I'm in the U.S. and heading global communications -- I could use all of it in the U.S."

She says the "This Changes Everything" theme came from results of clinical testing with the polyisoprene product. "We did blind clinical trials with SKYN, and latex and polyurethane condoms. People came back saying it just felt different, so we knew we had a winner, a game changer." 

Television ads will air on MTV, and Comedy Central. There are also out-of-home and digital elements, including online advertising plus a mobile app and viral video campaign launching in the coming weeks.

Major metropolitical sampling efforts will be run by teams of so-called “SKYN Girls,” and the grassroots elements include a "Make Out Booth" that will be in bars and nightclubs in New York and Chicago. The booths dispense a strip of SKYN condoms with every photo strip.

The company is selling the new product at big-box retailers, drugstores, grocery and convenience stores and online at sites like drugstore.com, soap.com and amazon.com. Carozza says the campaign, which initially eschews obvious humor, targets more mature men -- which is not to say older men, necessarily. "This isn't the sophomoric positioning you might be used to," she says. "It’s for someone who is probably a monogamist, has been with that person maybe a year or two, and is probably mid 20's. But we are also not alienating other audiences."

Yet there will be humorous elements, including the forthcoming viral video, in which several beautiful women remake a nerdy guy's bedroom.

Carozza says the ongoing campaign will have a second phase later in the year, and hinted at a program launching on Tuesday that extends SKYN to fashion with a play on the product as another form of evening wear.  

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