Good Vibrations, an adult retailer known for promoting healthy attitudes about sex, celebrated Pride Month this June by introducing a new advertising campaign to the San Francisco streets: bus shelter advertisements.
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| Good Vibrations "Duckie" Ad |
The bus shelter posters, which advertise the "I Rub My Duckie," a vibrator cleverly disguised as an innocuous bathtub toy, are displayed in 40 bus shelters along such notable San Francisco streets as Market, Mission, Van Ness, Polk, and the infamous Castro. The duck-shaped vibrator was chosen for the posters because of its discreet nature.
The ad space was purchased through Viacom Outdoor, which holds exclusive advertising rights for city bus shelters.
"They [the staff members of Viacom Outdoor] were clear that they didn't want us to show anything that was representational, like that showed anatomy or was too sexual. Like we couldn't have shown a Smoothie vibrator or a Hitachi magic wand," said Thomas Roche, marketing manager of Good Vibrations. "They were fine with the duckie because it's disguised."
Although Viacom Outdoor was cautious about accepting Good Vibrations as an advertiser, the posters were approved without much contention or controversy. While Good Vibrations is the first known adult store to advertise in bus shelters, awareness-oriented health ads on sex-related topics are old news to the Golden Gate city. Roche believes that previous health awareness campaigns, particularly dealing with HIV and AIDS, paved the way.
The positive buzz surrounding the off-beat ads have done Good Vibrations well; the ads are credited with bringing in a flood of new customers through its doors, including tourists who are in town for the Pride Month festivities.
"The ad is doing everything we wanted it to do," said Roche. "People have definitely been talking about it."
According to Andrea Burnett, publicist for Good Vibrations, the bus shelter ad campaign exemplifies the progressive, innovative thinking that has served the worker-owned, women-owned cooperative since its founding in 1977.
"While we're one of the older kids on the block, we explore really outside of the box ways of thinking about how to get the word out about our products and services to our customers," said Burnett.
In addition to the bus shelter ads, Good Vibrations also recently rented out a billboard for their Polk Street location and placed a print ad in Cosmopolitan magazine for their mail-order catalog and Website.
The bus shelter posters went up on June 9 for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month, an annual celebration of GLBT civil rights commemorating the Stonewall Rebellion. According to Roche, one of the motives behind the bus shelter ads was sending out a sexually positive message in honor of the celebration.
"We wanted to have a very strong presence for Pride Month," said Roche. "We really wanted to be out there being very visibly in favor of all sorts of sexual pride and sexual lifestyles, whatever they are.
"Pride Month is when we see the largest influx into San Francisco of people from all over the world coming to celebrate pride, so it's really important to us, for our business plan, to get them to realize that we have this great retail space," Roche added.
Good Vibrations actually has three great retail spaces: one on upper Polk Street in San Francisco, one on Valencia Street in the Mission District of San Francisco and a third in Berkley. Each of the stores provides customers with inviting displays and floor models of each of their products in a "clean, well-lighted" environment.
Although no firm plans have been set to purchase bus shelter ads for Pride Month next year, the doors are seemingly wide open if the co-op chooses to do so.So far, neither Viacom Outdoor nor Good Vibrations have received any complaints about the ads.
"There's been no negative feedback at all, so far, that we've gotten. Nothing at all," said Roche. "Everything's been positive and there's been a lot of glowing pride from people who are already our customers."
Good Vibrations is located at 1210 Valencia Street in San Francisco, CA, 1620 Polk Street in San Francisco, CA and at 2504 San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley, CA, or online at www.goodvibes.com.
