Spain used to be a Catholic country. Statistics show that practicing Catholics have dropped from around 80% in the 60’s to around 20% now. While religion in America is as strong as ever, in Europe it is on a steady decline. Aware of this, the MTV´s Spanish ad agency took a gamble and prepared a video that portrays young people who delay sex until marriage as losers. They were incredibly successful. The title of the video is I love Laura (but I will wait until we get married), Amo a Laura, pero esperaré hasta el matrimonio. The lyrics are absolutely hilarious. They basically say that passionate kissing is dirty, that it is better to do crossword puzzles than making love, they never say the words sex, or virginity. The way they make fun of religious principles vis a vis virginity is so elegant, that probably people the few people who are in favor of waiting until marriage were not offended.
Interestingly, MTV´s target audience is exactly the public that is about to have sex for the first time (or recently had it). Their key demographic age group is 13 to 18. As you can imagine, Youtube and Googlevideo went crazy with spoofs of the spoof. Some are pretty gross, some touch gay themes I love Batman focuses on Batman´s tight clothes. There´s also a very Spanish one that was done by the number one comedy Show in Spain and it shows the top politicians of the country saying how they love to negotiate with ETA, the basque terrorist organization.
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Hernán l: Romay on June 3, 2006 ·
I thought the people behind this video were some catholic nuts. I did some research on the Internet, and I found some websites claiming to be the ones behind the video. Most of them were called things like ¨Don´t watch tv society¨, etc. etc. Quite crazy.
If that´s the case, then it´s ones who can´t wait till marriage the ones that are considered losers.
I was raised at Catholic schools, in Argentina. I could tell you so many extremist examples on how the Church thinks it can manipulate young people´s opinion… Just a simple example. When we were in 5th grade (Colegio Don Bosco) a guy from our class was found with some from 7th “masturbating” (or so they thought they were doing) in the bathroom. The chief priest came to our boys only class and explained that everytime we touched our penises for extended periods of time we would lose a spoonful of blood… Of course, we found out that drinking water helped regenerate blood, right away…
4 years ago, in Los Angeles, CA, I attended a catholic wedding, with mariachis and all, and to my surprise, the songs they sang were the same ones I would sing 25+ years before… This led me to opposite conclusions: 1) Not renovating their structure (songs, procedure, marketing if you´d like) was the reason why the Church was losing faithfuls. But then, my second conclusion was that maybe this stiff structure was the key to have survived for so many years.
In all cases, I believe in striking first. And the Church, for that matter, has much more power than any other organisation. Why doesn´t it change?
Liedertexte on November 11, 2006 ·
Oh yes, the lyrics are in particular hilarious. I think MTV was only the first winner of the huge Youtube Community. Other branding ideas will follow.
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martin vives on June 3, 2006 ·
I discovered this AD just about a week ago, and I thought it was great because of the reasons you have already stated. I wouldn’t be surprised either if I hear that it becomes the song of the summer in Spain.
Anyway, martin, even if you say that Spain is less religious now than 30 years ago, there is still a gap between sexual behaviour of teens from spain and other countries.
The first time I slept with a girl was at 16 in US. And I was the younguest of my friends. The tradition of young guys to go to turistic areas in spain to find german or british girls to do what they couldnt with spanish ones has been a tradition for some of my friends during years.
Now I see that this tradition is changing due to the influence of other countries. Maybe some more liberalism is not too bad, but until what age can be negative for a kids education to start an active sexual life? I would not like to have my 16 year old dauther (in many years…) sleeping with a different guy every night.
Just a thought.