Condom-Giveaway Program Celebrates Birthday

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times At a party at New York University on Friday celebrating the sixth birthday of the city’s NYC Condom program, artwork from the packaging was posted on the walls.

At an art gallery, placing four condom cakes by the front door sets a certain tone. At the event Friday morning celebrating the sixth birthday of the city health department’s NYC Condom campaign, that tone was fun mixed with triumph.

Before the campaign started in 2007, the department handed out three million free male condoms a year, said Geoffrey Cowey, a former associate health commissioner. By last year that number had increased to about three million a month, as a result largely to a marketing campaign that brings images of the nation’s first city-branded condom to pay-phone walls, smartphone apps and, on Friday at least, the tops of four vanilla and chocolate cakes.

The program proved so successful that cities including Los Angeles and Philadelphia asked for advice on how to copy it, according to the department.

“The issue,” said Mr. Cowley, now a health reporter for MSNBC, “was how can we make condoms not this sleazy unmentionable that you get out of a sleazy vending machine at the gas station bathroom, and into something that everybody wants to have”

The answer, the city decided, was to eschew traditional public health messages like those on products like tobacco, which Mr. Cowley said aimed to terrify people, and instead trade on the fact that sex is fun.

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times Cakes at the party celebrated the condom package’s different designs.

The art exhibit, which opened Friday along hallway walls on the eighth floor of New York University’s Kimmel Center, showed the evolution of that message over time.

The ads featured couples smiling knowingly at each other, surrounded by color-soaked New York fixtures like the Brooklyn Bridge. Early ads displayed the NYC Condom logo in the iconic lettering of the subway system, replaced later by the somewhat more risqué slogan “Get Some.”

“The M.T.A. had never been entirely crazy about being a condom compny,” Mr. Cowley said. “They had to review a lot of our marketing materials. So we wanted to get out from under their censors.”

The program’s leaders seem to relish opportunities to tweak those with gentler sensibilities. During his prepared remarks, Mr. Cowley thanked The New York Post for giving the program a “bump” with a  scathing editorial, which in 2008 called the “Get Some” campaign “a borderline-sleazy message to appeal to the base instincts.”

Such rebukes mean “we must be doing something right,” said Dr. Monica Sweeney, an assistant health commissioner.

“We want to make New York City the safest city in the world to have sex,” she said.

Dr. Sweeney then proceeded to offer a visitor a delicious slice of vanilla cake.