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Voila! The Don’t
Get Caught Mirror


Attached to one's computer, it tells you who's coming

Jun 19, 2009

If you are a porn site, how in the world do you tout your wares, such as they are, to the outside world?

It's not easy. You can't go on TV or radio, for sure. You can't really advertise on the internet either.

We can report that an agency in Brazil has come up with a way.

It’s called the Don’t Get Caught Mirror, as in don’t get caught looking at naked ladies at work.

The mirror is a couple inches in diameter and looks like a rearview mirror you’d find on a motorcycle, with a small plastic arm jutting out to one side.

The mirror is attached to the side of one's computer, so you can see who's approaching from behind. Say it's your boss. You can quickly jump from that porn site you were staring at to that spreadsheet you were supposed to be working on.

DDB Brasil came up with the Don’t Get Caught Mirror for its client, Sexy Clube, an adult magazine and web site. It sent 4,000 mirrors out via direct mail to Sexy Clube subscribers.

"What people are most afraid when visiting adult content web sites is to get caught. So we thought, let’s propose a simple solution for the ones who want to visit this site, and the number of visitors will increase naturally," say DDB Brasil’s Ricardo Salgado and Guilherme Jahara, who worked on the campaign.

"That was the insight for our direct mail."

The brilliance of the campaign is in both its cheekiness and its practicality.

Cheeky because it nods to the reality that despite their huge traffic, porn sites are treated as if they didn't exist by polite society, practical because the mirrors are branded with a large Sexy Clube logo on the back.

In the end, the mirror is a wonderful gimmick to capture people's attention. Someone sees the mirror, looks, sees the logo, and gets the joke. (Or someone explains it to him or her.)

The campaign ran last December in Sao Paulo. The cost was minimal, and recipients were encouraged to share the mirrors with their friends at work.

"It’s a campaign that has everything to do with the public: good humored and intelligent," say Salgado and Jahara. "The men had identified with the product, they know how complicated it is to enter sites such as the Sexy Clube. And believe us, they get in those web sites even at work."

Apparently so.

The campaign, which received extensive coverage in ad industry blogs, helped drive up the number of Sexy Club web site visitors from December to early 2009 by 34 percent. The number of subscribers went up 12 percent.



Toni Fitzgerald is a staff writer for Media Life.




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