LoveHoney - Getting Screwed

Topical and cheeky at the same time.

For those unfamiliar with LoveHoney, they are a brand of sex toys (among other things - mostly sexual wellness products). For those unfamiliar with advertising, this makes for a very difficult company to buy media for. The creative team that managed this campaign - CampaignLab - was optimistic, and found a way to tie the brand to a popular news story that was in circulation at the time.

In early June 2023, the Reserve Bank (of Australia) announced an interest rate increase, bringing the interest rate up to 4.1%. The CampaignLab/LoveHoney team then deployed this creative across every major city in Australia:

What we loved

Sexual wellness companies are notoriously difficult to design creatives for - essentially because you have to skirt around the topic of sex to be allowed to advertise. So, companies like LoveHoney have to be quite clever to get around these restrictions. In this case, they found a topic that people were already aware of, and potentially negatively affected by (interest rates) and made light of it.

What makes this creative great though is the language in play here. The double entendre surrounding the word "screwed" simultaneously communicates the feeling of being screwed by interest rates as well as LoveHoney's core product offering. That, and obviously the sex-toy-shaped text. Not only is it highly topical, it is also highly unusual as a billboard ad:

In fact, both News.com.au and Yahoo! Finance thought so, too.