The commercial
The Durex spot aired in November 2017 and ran about twenty seconds. A voiceover introduces the viewer to a woman named Vika: “Want to meet a girl? How about Vika? Charming, romantic, fun… and she has syphilis. She doesn’t know it.” The closing line, “When you like a girl, you don’t think about it,” ties the story to the theme of protection during sex. On screen the woman stands against a pink background, while large captions “AND SHE HAS SYPHILIS” and “SHE DOESN’T KNOW IT” fill the center of the frame.
Adaptation and edits
According to one source, the ad was an adaptation of an English-language spot in which the heroine was named Kate and had gonorrhea. In addition, according to a report from the Telegram channel Mash, women named Vika complained to Durex, after which the spot was reworked and the name was removed from the text. This information rests on a single source. Still, the very fact that the character was renamed indirectly confirms that the ad hit home for people whose name matched the heroine’s.
Reaction from regulators and doctors
In June 2018 the Federal Antimonopoly Service opened a case against Reckitt Benckiser, Durex’s manufacturer, under the advertising law. The basis was the claim that “almost every second Russian is infected with a sexually transmitted infection.” The Ministry of Health, according to a report from RNS, agreed that the claim was unreliable: by its data, the number of primary infections had been declining, from about 650,000 in 2007 to about 207,000 in 2017. Durex relied on recommendations from the Moscow city health department, but those materials were expert opinions rather than official statistics.
The meme and its variants
According to one source, the phrase became a meme in late January and early February 2018, when memes about Vika and syphilis began appearing on VKontakte. One way of using it is to mock the very situation shown in the ad. Another is to prank friends: the line is captioned under a photo of a girlfriend. In some versions, a portrait of another girl or even a couple replaces Vika. Lawyer Victoria Dergunova, quoted in one reference, noted that the name “Vika” is not protected by law and belongs to no one, so she finds it hard to see how the ad violates the rights of any particular group of people.
Consequences for namesakes
The meme shows how an ad can turn against people who have nothing to do with it. There were reports of schoolgirls named Vika being teased with this phrase in class and on social media. The ad did not name any real people, but it linked a name with a disease, and that was enough for the joke to stop being about the ad and become about a specific person. This is a typical mechanism: an ordinary name used in text without any context becomes a pretext for mocking those who bear it.
