CP+B found an unusual way to promote Fruit of the Loom’s No Ride-Up Boxer Briefs: plastic pants.
The agency introduced the idea with a 30-second broadcast spot featuring guys wearing see-through plastic pants jumping around to prove the “no ride up” claim. But CP+B decided to extend the campaign in stealthy fashion. They created a fake fashion line called Plastique, which appeared in a large billboard in SoHo. Fruit of the Loom’s branding appears in the model’s underwear, and more subtly in the Plastique logo. The agency even went so far as to create a fake designer for Plastique, Frank La Rant, giving the character his own Twitter handle, website, an extensive backstory and even a documentary.
“We deliberately made it high-end fashion but with a question mark,” CP+B associate creative director Mona Hasan told Digiday.”We wanted people to say, ‘It’s plastic pants; could this actually be real?'”