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Adult Store Hid Sex Toys All Over This Real-Estate Listing in Iceland

Cleverly skirting the social media rules

This gives a new meaning to real estate porn.

Gerður Huld owns Blush, an adult entertainment store in Iceland. Social media sites like Facebook have strict policies about advertising sex products, so Blush’s agency, PiparTBWA, had to get creative. Sometimes, that means hiding products in plain sight, like butt plugs on a shelf.

Huld put her house up for sale and included a series of interior photos. It appeared to be a typical house listing, but upon closer inspection, an accoutrement of sex toys could be seen, like a pure wand on a bookshelf, a fist in the shower and a fleshlight in the kitchen. And that mouse by the computer? It’s not a mouse.

Less than a day after the listing went up, viewers took to social media to share what they discovered.

Video Reference
Blush Real Estate Campaign

Six days later, Blush launched a radio, online and outdoor campaign called “Spot the Difference.”

The agency’s brief was to “sell a positive and healthy experience, promote sexual health and healthy attitudes towards sex, and find a way to promote sex toys without breaking any social media rules.”

“We wanted people to have some fun finding all the toys because some of them were not spotted the first days,” says Agga Jónsdóttir, creative director at PiparTBWA. “When we finally launched the campaign, Gerður did an Instagram story about our plan and goal to normalize sexual health. Gerður was quite nervous that people would not spot the toys the first day, but after 24 hours everything went quite crazy. A game launched six days later with still life images for consumers to ‘spot the difference’ and find all the toys. The winner got a Blush gift certificate.”

Campaign pics, which made it through to social media and OOH, have solid color backdrops and combine luxe items like jewelry, makeup, cocktails, bejeweled sunglasses, champagne and macarons with toys from Blush’s website.

“We wanted to find a slogan that could mean many things and be witty enough to get people talking without crossing any boundaries or offending people,” Jónsdóttir tells Muse. “We also wanted to show real sex toys with normal objects to try to break the taboo around sexual pleasure. Most of the sex toys are evolved around touch and feeling, and ‘finndu’ in Icelandic can both mean feel and find, and ‘muninn’ means both the difference and object. Spot the difference has the similar meaning as to both finding an object or feeling a difference.”

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