To find a relevant way to raise awareness and promote real and safe sex among the youngest consumers in the country, with the added challenge of impacting an elusive audience that doesn’t tend to connect with advertising or traditional media.

In the midst of an era of hypersexualisation, sexual education is almost conspicuous by its absence: the first point of contact with sex for young people today is through porn, and the use of condoms among teenagers has fallen from 82% in 2018 to 70% in 2022.

In this context, Durex sought to raise awareness about real, safe and satisfying sex among young Spaniards. To achieve this, something more than a traditional advertising campaign was needed. We needed to be relevant and to be where our audience was: on TikTok. TikTok is a platform that’s currently at peak popularity and a destination where users go to learn new things.

But it wasn’t enough to create a channel and be on TikTok only as a brand. That’s why we decided to launch a service designed exclusively for them and non-intrusive. We created “Hay Tema” by Durex, the first 24/7 service for young people to answer sex-related questions and concerns. An open and participatory initiative that communicates in their own language, right in the place where they can be themselves.

“Hay Tema” was presented as a safe space to share concerns through DMs and open comments, a place to get real-time answers from experts, as well as somewhere to find in-channel ad-hoc videos with the most interesting questions.

The first thing we did was to locate expert sexologists and other collaborators specialised in LGTBIQ+, sex and digital, representatives of the porn industry and established creators and tasking them with talking about real sex and debunking myths for the benefit of young people, either through DMs and comments, or through short videos made in the style of the latest TikTok trends.

We fed the channel with the first organic content and launched “Hay Tema” through a paid campaign in which we played with double meanings to advertise our consultancy service and, in parallel, we collaborated with relevant influencers such as Marina Rivers, who made TikToks with their own related doubts and encouraged users to post their own.

In order to provide young people with real-time answers, we hired a team of community managers to receive questions from the community and perform monitoring and filtering tasks. They then selected the most interesting and useful ones for our followers and generated content around them.

From the launch of the campaign until now, we have addressed topics such as tips for more pleasurable sex, doubts about sexual practices, how to protect yourself from STIs and curiosities such as what is the G-spot. All this was done through a useful, relevant, 100% digital and unprecedented initiative which offered something new compared to the usual structure of existing channels, where content is scheduled in a way that doesn’t respond to the real sentiment of the audience.

We developed a monitoring dashboard to have a global vision of each of our levers: organic, paid and influencers. Every week we observed how each of them was helping us spread the content, increase the size of the community and achieve our objectives.

This strategy allowed us to make decisions week by week and adjust the strategy, optimising the content and the use of influencers to maximise dissemination and results right from the start of the project.