Responses by Filipe Gouveia, global business director, CROSSMEDIA; and Kirsty Hathaway, executive creative director, JOAN London.
Background: “Ann Summers has always been a cultural provocateur, the original brand to put sex to the high street championing and to say boldly: ‘Sex is for women too,’” says Kirsty Hathaway. “While the brand pioneered the movement, the cultural conversation around sex and pleasure has shifted—and so too has Ann Summers’ ambition. The sex toy and lingerie brand knew it had to modernize to be relevant to the upcoming generations as well as those who grew up with them. It wanted to appeal to women from 25 to 45 years old and cement its position as the United Kingdom’s leading authority on female pleasure.”
Design thinking: “We developed a survey with YouGov to really understand how women were feeling about sex and about pleasure as a whole,” Hathaway explains. “The results were interesting because, while we’re living in a culture increasingly surrounded by sex positivity, the survey showed that women still feel starved of sexual satisfaction. Thirty-five percent of women admit they’re not satisfied in the bedroom and over a third of British women struggle to reach peak pleasure. Also, 56 percent say foreplay matters just as much as sex.
“Under the platform ‘Life is foreplay,’ the brand reframes pleasure not as a performance or a hopeful byproduct of sex but as the main event,” she continues. “It leans into the findings from the survey that foreplay is an important part of pleasure, but the play on words accompanied by the everyday moments of the suggestive images brings a new creative direction for Ann Summers that is playful, provocative and a little bit cheeky. With no models, there’s no depiction of what sexy should look like—the only star in the campaign is your imagination.”
Challenges: “Ann Summers has always pushed the boundaries and challenged convention., and that legacy comes with its challenges,” says Filipe Gouveia. “Each creative execution had to be vetted by the media owner—a few of whom were uncomfortable with the campaign. Some rejected it outright, and there were intense discussions around what was deemed ‘appropriate’ for public spaces.”
“Ann Summers faces a lot of shadow banning,” says Hathaway. “The list of what we couldn’t say was way longer than what we could due to the nature of the brand’s business. So, it became a huge creative challenge to land on a space and creative that was provocative and subtle, suggestive and playful, and impactful and attention grabbing all within the parameters.”
Favorite details: “Modernizing an iconic and legendary brand is a brief everybody wishes to have land on their desk,” says Hathaway. “Ann Summers is so iconic. It’s a brand that means so much to so many Brits, and there’s a whole generation to whom it means nothing. To be able to create a space and a world where the brand can show up, stand out and be bold with its point of view was a real honor. The challenges along the way with shadow banning and navigating what is too overt, what is too subtle and will bypass the audience was a fun part of the dance. We are really proud of being able to fuse together being suggestive, provocative, sensual, cheeky and witty all at once. It was no simple undertaking. But what is the fun in a simple undertaking?
“And, having an all female team on the project was wonderful,” she adds. “I am so proud that we are able to do that at JOAN.”
Visual influences: “We spent a great deal of time doing image research—how to portray a big message that needs to work really hard and be eye catching while also feeling fresh and modern,” Hathaway says. “There wasn’t one photographer or reference that fueled the concept but a combination of different images that we thought were interesting. We also wanted to avoid cliches used to evoke traditional sexiness.”
Specific project demands: “A real unlock came from creative director Jo Ridley,” says Hathaway. “The name Ann Summers does a lot of work of taking your mind to where we need it to go because of how iconic and well known the brand is. This allowed us to play with more subtleties, which, again, helped when considering getting approval from media owners.”
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