Clear Blue Easy Fertility Monitor - Reviews of a Funny Ad

How can a pregnancy test suddenly find itself featured prominently in the New York Times and other media? Well, for the Clear Blue Easy Fertility Monitor it was easy - a controversial television commercial featuring lots of pee.

The ad showed a stream of pee falling from space onto a Clear Blue Easy monitor, and the voiceover: "Introducing the most sophisticated piece of technology you will ever - pee on." (You can view it here.)

The commercial was quickly picked up the blogosphere, with the Adrants blog commenting:

We've all seen sterile ads for feminine products in which piss or menstrual fluid comes out blue. We all know that piss and menstrual fluid are not actually blue. Those crazy cats at Amalgamated, the very guys who brought us Ben & Jerry claymation, decide to stomp on the polite institution of blue bodily fluid for their client Clear Blue Easy and its new digital pregnancy test.

We would have respected them for that. But they took things one step further and put the pregnancy test in space, a la Dark Star, and then let fall a stream of disembodied space piss! And then our brains exploded.

And quickly it was all over the blogosphere. The Blogging Baby blogger described the ad as "pure genius", adding that "it is about time that someone realizes that hey, these products are made to be peed on".

Another blogger said:

I’d just like to thank the Clear Blue people for making a worrisome, messy situation fun! If it weren’t for the fact that men would probably be creeped out by prego test during football, this would be a perfect, much-talked-about Superbowl Ad.

As so often happens nowadays, the blog buzz around the ads got picked up by the mainstream media, with no less an institution than the Times entering the fray, claming the ads "have broken a taboo on urination in public".
 
And the article also said:
 
Charles Rosen, president of Amalgamated, describes Inverness [maker of Clear Blue] as the agency's most progressive client. "We could see right away this company would be willing to shatter taboos in women's communications," Rosen said.
 
Amalgamated executives noticed, he added, a willingness among women to talk about sex and pregnancy in such hit TV series as "Sex in the City" and "Desperate Housewives." "We were picking up on cues from pop culture, from music, film and television, that women were willing to talk like this," Rosen said.
 
Using humor to dispel what lingering embarrassment there may be among consumers was the most important element in the campaign, he said.
 
One advertising professor and author said he believed the frankness of the campaign worked. Urinating in a commercial is "a public act" that "may be considered an infantile way in which to gain attention," said Neil Alperstein, professor of advertising and popular culture at Loyola College who is the author of "Advertising in Everyday Life." The campaign is really about "attention, gaining and maintaining it," Alperstein said. "That's the ticket to successful advertising for a distracted generation."
 
Early results for the Clear Blue Easy campaign indicate he may be right. Godon said that sales at one of Inverness's largest retailers had increased 78 percent in a four-week period compared with a year earlier.
 
As for the company, it just said that it hoped to turn Clear Blue into "a cultural icon" of the women's reproductive health category.

* Get more information on the Clear Blue Easy Fertility Monitor.

February 19th, 2007
Updated: November 9th, 2007

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