Just what the heck is in the water at Rethink’s offices these days?
On Thursday, one day after its New York office premiered a buzzy short film for Doritos that hilariously spoofs ‘80s porn, Rethink Montreal office revealed some similarly spicy work for sex toy brand Dame featuring highly descriptive product reviews written by some of North America's premier erotica authors.
Timed for National Orgasm Day, “Toy Stories” is built around what Rethink called a “sexy, literary, and shameless” peek into pleasure.
It consists of steamy reviews for 10 Dame products written by 11 authors, including Cathryn Fox, a Nova Scotia writer whose books include titles like “Single Dad Next Door” and “Hands On”; Ontario writer J.C. Hannigan (“Off Beat,” “Reckless Abandon”); and U.S. writer Nikki Sloane (“The Pool Boy,” “Three Hard Lessons”).
Dame said that the “Toy Stories” anthology, which is available both in print and on Dame.com, is designed to counter a significant challenge in the sex toy industry: users’ reluctance to leave proper reviews of products,” instead resorting to unimaginative descriptions like "works" and "great battery life."
Rethink Montreal creative director Geneviève Jannelle said in a release that too many sex toy shoppers are being left in the dark by users’ timidity in sharing forthright reviews about its various products.
“By partnering with these sensual and erotic writers, we’re engaging our community and ‘smut’ readers through a format they are already familiar with and love,” added Dame CEO Alexandra Fine. “With this, we hope ‘Toy Stories’ inspires people, especially women, to feel more comfortable discussing sex and sexuality openly and shedding shame around pleasure.
"At the very least, we’re giving people a vivid, graphic and sensual understanding of how our toys can help transform their fantasies into reality.”
Dame didn’t go into detail in the release, but a launch video featuring a steamy review of the Bullet Vibe for Play by author Willow Winters provides a pretty to-the-point overview of the project. It’s hard to even euphemistically describe Winters’ provocative prose.
Euphemisms, though, are the throbbing heart of Rethink New York’s work for Doritos. The campaign for the PepsiCo brand’s new Golden Sriracha chips stars current “it” actor Walton Goggins, fresh off his acclaimed role in the most recent season of The White Lotus, in a nearly four-minute film called “A Spicy But Not Too Spicy Plumber.”
Nodding to a classic pornography trope—hot tradesman called to the home of a beautiful woman to “fix” something—the innuendo-laden script features Goggins as the titular character, who’s oblivious to the not-so-subtle come-ons made by the young bombshell who has summoned him to her home to fix her pipes.
There’s lots of lip-biting, seductive posing and double entendres (“maybe I should go down there and…take a good look,” says the plumber, before letting loose with a steady stream of plumber lingo about gasket failure and a “breach at the P-trap compression junction” that serves to kill the mood).
Not even the presence of a roommate attracted by all the “banging” he’s hearing, and a cougar who’s been out “shampooing [her] kitty” is enough to get the plumber’s mind off his commitment to piping…until he tries the new Golden Sriracha chips, that is.
In a LinkedIn post, Rethink’s global chief creative officer, Aaron Starkman, said that the press day consisted of “multiple exclamation mark group texts.”
Overall, then, a week of particularly provocative production!
