The Urge to F*”**

For nearly four decades, Tulipán has been helping Argentines have safer sex. Now, together with Zurda Agency, the brand is confronting a rather unexpected problem for a condom company: people are having less sex.
That tension gave rise to “The Urge to F*”**, a new campaign developed by Zurda Agency for Tulipán that turns a cultural reality into something the brand had never created before: its own fragrance.
And it’s not a fictional product.
“The Urge to F*” is a real, unisex, limited-edition fragrance**, developed by Tulipán together with Zurda Agency and available through the brand’s sales channels.
The launch began in the run-up to Students’ Day and the start of spring, one of the most important dates in Tulipán’s calendar. The brand wiped its Instagram account, changed its bio to “We don’t know what else to do to get you to have sex”, and issued a public apology to young Argentines.
Then it launched a perfume.
The idea is built around a generational contradiction: we have never talked so much about sex, yet we are having less of it.
Research conducted by Tulipán in Argentina, covering desire, satisfaction, sexual frequency and relationships, found a clear gap between what people want and what they actually get: only four in ten Argentines had sex in the past month, while more than half say they would like a more active sex life than they currently have.
The campaign takes that tension to its logical extreme by turning desire itself into a product.
To introduce it, Zurda created a film that plays with the classic — and deliberately exaggerated — conventions of fragrance advertising, alongside a mockumentary produced by MAMÁ HÚNGARA and directed by Carmen Rivoira and Fede García Rico.
The fictionalised documentary treats the lack of sex almost as if it were a national emergency, constantly moving between reality, absurdity and comedy.
For Zurda, the creative challenge was precisely to turn a real issue into an idea capable of sparking conversation without losing Tulipán’s distinctive tone of voice.
“Every condom brand in the world sells protection against consequences. We had to sell protection against indifference, which is a much stranger brief. The joke only works because the concern behind it is real. This is a generation that talks about sex more than any generation before it and, at the same time, is having less of it. We built the campaign so people could arrive at that conversation themselves, after they had finished laughing,” said Diego Gueler Montero, co-founder and Chief Creative Officer at Zurda Agency.
“We have spent nearly forty years telling Argentines to use protection. It never occurred to us that one day the problem would be getting them to need it. The numbers aren’t funny, which is exactly why the campaign had to be. If a perfume is what it takes to get a generation talking about desire again, then we’ll sell perfume,” added Victoria Kopelowicz, CEO of Tulipán.
“The Urge to F*”** runs across social media, out of home, streaming and television throughout the last week of September.
The fragrance is a limited edition and is available across all of Tulipán’s sales channels.
The mockumentary was produced by MAMÁ HÚNGARA, which worked closely with Zurda to find the right balance between fiction, reality and comedy, while giving the actors room to improvise during the shoot and help shape the tone of the film.
“We had a lot of fun making the ‘mockumentary’. During the shoot, it was essential to give the actors room to improvise so we could get the comedic tone just right, and that collaborative process with Zurda worked perfectly. The best jokes came out of that back-and-forth between all of us, trying out different takes on the same script,” said Carmen Rivoira and Fede García Rico, directors at MAMÁ HÚNGARA.