Emotive.
How do you approach a generation that is engaging in more unsafe sex and avoiding AI-generated STI monsters in Public Service Announcements (PSA)?
Four Seasons Naked Condoms, Emotive and AiCandy went the entertainment route.
Directed by AiCandy’s filmmaking duo Too Short for Modelling, the hero film follows two individual's casual decision not to use a condom, that quickly escalates into a giant baby kaiju crashing through the city, followed by monster personifications of gonorrhea, chlamydia and syphilis tearing through streets and buildings.
Emotive chief creative officer Gavin McLeod told AdNews that as people are effectively ignoring the messaging, they had to create a way to attract their attention, involve them and entertain them, as opposed to lecture them.
“We’ve made Gonorrhea, Syphilis and Chlamydia kind of likeable,” McLeod told AdNews.
“They're engaging characters, and that was intentional. You want to have characters that are pulling you in, but at the same time not losing the main message.
“There’s a hint of a menace to them as well. They're weirdly likeable, slightly off-putting characters, and that was an intentional choice.
“Four seasons is an incredible client, because they are prepared to do bold and disruptive work, but they also held us accountable all the way through.”
There were more than 101,000 chlamydia cases nationally in 2024, with around half among 20–29-year-olds, alongside rising Gonorrhea infections, according to research from the Kirby Institute.
Condom use among young Australians is declining, with more than 50% not using a condom the last time they had sex, according to La Trobe University.
“In general practice we see young patients presenting with sexually transmitted infections every single day,” said Coogee Beach Doctors GP Dr Lucy Herron.
“Chlamydia is very common and often has no symptoms, but can lead to serious complications, including infertility, if not detected early.”
Emotive CEO Simon Joyce said that the condom category is very difficult to advertise in.
“It’s difficult to win the mental availability of consumers, because there's so many restrictions around advertising condoms, which is crazy in this world, and it's something that should be normalised. And normalising stuff can happen through advertising.”
Emotive collaborated with AiCandy from the beginning, supporting the entire story development and creative process.
AiCandy co-founder and head of creative, Marcus Tesoriero said that they see themselves as a story company.
“No amount of technology will turn a bad idea into a good idea. You've got to have the backbone of a great story,” Tesoriero said.
“We don't like anything walking out of our door unless it has an elevation of craft.
“The creative process went right to the end, because it kept evolving and getting bigger. That's the power of AI.
“In a traditional shoot, you’d be constricted to what you filmed that day. With AI, we could tweak and amend characters whenever.
“When we got to the end of the hero film, we went to Emotive Productions and turned the characters into social content pieces.
“This has been a collaborative partnership from the start, and we are so thankful that Emotive brought us in at the early stages.”
McLeod said that in the process of an eight-week production period, you can see how quickly the AI space is moving.
"At the beginning of the process, we were having problems with pack shots," he said.
“The consistency of all the details on pack shots were either spelled wrong or not quite right, but by the end of the process, utilising new tools helped solve the problem.
“So even during the process, you're swapping tools all the way along to solve problems as they prop up.”
AiCandy co-founder and head of production, Kent Boswell said that the only limit is imagination.
“We now live in this world where the guide rails that were once constraining us, where we could only film at one location, are now wiped off the table," said Boswell.
“And it means we can go really big and bold with our ideas, and now our only limitation is our imagination.
“All of us in this industry need to retrain our brains for how we think about content creation with the power of generative AI.”
The campaign launches on Snapchat, meeting Gen Z where they already spend time.
A mix of short form content, creator partnerships and social extensions created by the Emotive Productions specialist AI team is designed to drive participation, not just awareness.
The campaign is built to evolve in public. As it rolls out, the characters will respond directly to audience comments, turning social reactions into part of the storytelling and extending the idea beyond the initial film.
“The closed nature of Snapchat and the style of conversation that happens around this, where you're communicating with 40 or 50 friends, felt contextually right for this message,” Joyce said.
The success of the campaign will be measured through its comms, broader marketing objective and business success.
"The comms metrics comes down to the efficiency of the creative, what we are seeing from an engagement point of view, views through tags, comments and shares.
"This campaign will run for months. We'll need university studies to prove the impact of this campaign.
“We also need to see an increase in market share for Four Season's Naked Condoms.”
Four Seasons Condoms director Michael Porter said the brand set out to create something people would choose to engage with.
“We needed to move beyond traditional messaging,” Porter said.
“This is about starting a conversation in a way that reflects how people actually consume content today, something that feels entertaining, not instructional.”
Credits
Creative Agency: Emotive
Hero Film Production: Ai Candy
Social Production: Emotive Productions
PR: Emotive
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