Dueling Media Campaigns About Sexual Abstinence Let Everybody Off the Hook

It’s difficult to be enthusiastic while you’re telling teens not to have sex, much less look hip and cool about it, which is why the Texas Department of Health spent about $395,000 producing the public service announcements that anchor its new sexual abstinence media campaign, "Zip-It!," now showing in five major markets in the state. The TV spot (there’s a radio spot, a logo, a t-shirt, and a keychain, too) is recognizable by the slogan, "You don’t have to prove your love." The words flash like a marquee to the beat of a hip-hop song, while a camera peers through a fisheye lens at a DJ scratching a record in a narrow booth. According to Sherry Matthews, whose Austin-based Sherry Matthews Advertising Agency researched and produced "Zip-It!" for TDH, the music was developed by Los Angeles hip-hop producer Milk Chocolate, and Rolling Tiger films shot the video on the same set as the ‘La Vida Loca’ video. The biggest threat to "Zip-It!" is that teens will feel patronized by it, so no "Zip-It!" material identifies the sponsor as TDH, and a "Zip-It!" website won’t be linked to TDH’s. "The point was to make this something that’s really hip and cool for the kids, to position it as something they can really buy into," Matthews says.

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