Hair care brand Mark Hill Hair is promising its new eyebrow-raising out-of-home (OOH) is ‘not a sex toy’ in a campaign to promote the brand’s latest peculiar-looking styling hair product.
Showcased across billboards, buses and digital ad-vans throughout Nottingham and London in high footfall locations, such as Big Ben and The London Eye, the advert features a head-turning creative.
Depicting the brand’s new bubble-shaped jumbo waver style tool, the tongue-in-cheek OOHs play on the fact that the brand’s products are often mistaken as sex toys.
The suspicious-looking black hair-styling tool is sharply contrasted against the billboard’s vibrant pink background and is accompanied by text that reads ‘the bigger, the better’, and ‘this is not a sex toy’.
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The five-figure campaign follows a consumer survey run by Mark Hill Hair that revealed 64% of UK adults thought the jumbo waver was a sex toy when shown an image.
Following the phallic feedback Mark Hill Hair partnered with Love Island star Chloe Burrows, who took to the streets of London with a megaphone to clarify the nature of the product.
The campaign also hopes to ‘smash preconceptions’ around purchasing and using a sex toy, helping people feel comfortable both with how they look and over-owning a traditionally ‘taboo’ item.
“We want to establish Mark Hill Hair as a brand that pushes the boundaries, disrupts the industry, and stands out from the crowd, and this campaign does exactly that,” said Mark Hill Hair marketing director Gemma Montgomery-Dickens.
“Rather than show static images around the city we have teamed up with a reality TV star to tackle the taboos of self-love.”
“When deciding on the advert design, we wanted to lean into the fact that our styling tools can be mistaken as sex toys, grabbing attention, and also helping to break the taboo,” Montgomery-Dickens added.
“Together we will turn taboos into talking points and create a place for open discussions on what really puts us at the top of our game.”
