Breaking a TV Taboo

The ad is tame, but it is also a trail blazer. In a new television commercial that went on the air last week in Dallas and Los Angeles, a series of black-and-white scenes depicts changes in women's lifestyles, from fashions to careers, during the past quarter-century. As the screen switches to color, a young professional woman is seen at work. A voice-over notes that for all the progress during those years, choices in female birth control had changed little "until Today." Introduced last year by VLI (third-quarter sales: $2.76 million), Today is the disposable contraceptive sponge now used by more than 600,000 women.

Despite the proliferation of explicit sexual themes in entertainment programming and commercials on television, ads for birth control devices are still considered taboo. While all three major networks refused to show the Today commercials, the ads will be running on 34 stations, some of them network affiliates, in 14 cities by next week. VLI decided to try local TV advertising after receiving mostly favorable reactions to a series of radio ads it started last summer. The company says that product inquiries have doubled since the advertising campaigns began.