One Pound Johnny Club goes viral

The chances of this particular PR stunt staying on YouTube for any length of time are low.

But on the other hand, the number of people searching for it as a result of the fact that it keeps getting taken down is only going to rise as a result.

Warning: don't watch this video if you're easily offended!

It’s a cracking little example – and we haven’t really seen one for a while – of a brand turning to the “let’s make something, get it banned and then get everyone talking about it” page in the text book of PR stunts.

But for all the route is a hackneyed one, it’s worked.

There’s nothing that the world loves more than a reasonably (but not entirely) risqué campaign being banned by “the man” – in this case, YouTube.

There’s something about it that immediately puts the brand behind the campaign on the side of the punter and rather endears it to the watching public.

And if you’re a challenger brand in the world of condoms – taking on the might of Durex in a war on price – that’s exactly the position that you want to be in.

One Pound Johnny Club is the business in question and has taken its challenger positioning in its category all the way to its marketing – creating a campaign that not only communicates the brand positioning, but demonstrates it through brand behaviour.

Not something that every marketer achieves, but a tactic that all should learn from and seek to emulate (albeit in ways that are a little more appropriate to their own charges of course).

OPJC has done some smart work – creating a piece of content that is just plain fun, getting it banned by the monster of online video and then getting smaller, edgier viral sites to take it.

At that point, it’s a perfect meme. The sites that are willing to carry it want to drive traffic so push it hard to their audiences. Their audiences, aware that they’re watching (and then sharing) something that has a degree of the salacious attached to it are all the more likely to spread the word.

And the brand can simply sit back in the middle of it all, give their campaign the odd poke to keep it running … and reap the rewards.

James Gordon-MacIntosh is a managing partner at Hope&Glory PR and occasionally pens things on Spinning Around, a blog that he describes as “thinking out loud”. He hasn’t been thinking much lately.