A dog named `Condom` launches campaign

New Delhi, Nov 14: India Friday launched an advertisement involving a dog named "Condom" to popularise contraceptive usage, nearly six months after a “condom condom” mobile ring tone commercial boosted its sale by 85 million.“There is still a huge problem in promoting condom usage. There is a lot of hesitation and there is a need to popularise its use and increase its acceptability. Hence these advertisements,” said K Sujatha Rao, head of the National AIDS Control Society.

“Many sex workers tell our officers (involved in popularising the contraceptive) that men would rather pay more than use a condom,” she said, adding “contraceptive usage is very important to curb the AIDS threat”. In the new advertisement, a pesky parrot irritates the puppy named “Condom” and an old lady comes to the dog`s rescue. The campaign produced by BBC World Service aims at adult Indian men. “The lady proclaims support for condom and the campaign summarizes this in the tagline "Jo Samjha Wohi Sikander (the one who understands is a winner),” a health official said. India is home to 2.5 million HIV/AIDS patients including 70,000 children below the age of 14. The lady reinforces the message that condoms mean good sense and those who know it are the real winners in life! The advertisement will be seen on television and in cinemas nationally from mid-November. Earlier the ring tone campaign, which chants “condom, condom, condom”, became a massive success in India and abroad, with nearly 500,000 requests to download it in India. Another 160,000 people, mainly from outside India, downloaded the ring tone from a popular website. Recently, the ring tone campaign made it to the top of the list of five most innovative condom campaigns in the world on CNN.com. Currently over a billion condoms are being sold in a year in India and a sale of three billion is being targeted by 2010. IANS