Katherine Dodds spoke about promoting sexual health in a positive way 10 years ago at an educational conference as a guest of Planned Parenthood, which is now Options for Sexual Health.

“I used the phrase ‘pleasure management,’ which I might even have invented as I was doing that talk,” said Dodds. “But their executive director afterwards came up to me and said that’s really good, can we use that? And I said sure, why don’t you hire me.”

That kicked off a long-term partnership with Options for Sexual Health. That union most recently resulted in a campaign called That’s So Sexy to promote condom use in two TV ads, one aimed at heterosexual pairings, the other homosexual.

The dialogue is suggestive, the music pulsing in the spots that are “putting sex into advertising where it belongs,” according to Dodds, instead of pushing body lotion and deodorant.

Dodds, founder and creative director for Good Company Communications, which is better known as Hello Cool World, believes fear-based marketing hasn’t worked for sexual health.

“STIs [sexually transmitted infections] have been on the rise, they continue to be, and HIV and all of the problems associated with that,” she said.

Her company, which celebrated its 10th anniversary on Valentine’s Day, focuses on positive messages, grassroots social marketing campaigns and promoting health and social causes.

Hello Cool World, a play on “goodbye cruel world,” involves its audiences from conception to delivery. Its campaigns encourage individuals to sign up online for more information and to spread the word on topics ranging from the importance of regular pap tests to the ideas presented in the book and movie The Corporation.

Hello Cool World distributes and markets independent films, getting its first big break with hit documentary The Corporation and continuing with 65_RedRoses and Manufactured Landscapes. It puts profits from DVD sales back into campaigns to boost interest and benefit causes.

Dodds, originally from the B.C. Interior, studied visual arts at the University of Victoria and worked in community television and at Adbusters magazine. For a time, she held regular art and performance events out of her converted storefront Chinatown home before completing a master’s degree at the University of Leeds in England.

“I came back wanting to actually do things and have an impact,” she said.

Her company began essentially as a one-person enterprise, but has grown to include a roster of staff and contractors as need demands with work that places a heavy emphasis on new media.

Hello Cool World’s mandate is to provide ideas to audiences, move audiences to action, and create outcomes from that action.

Dodds said the sexy, grassroots LACE Campaign that Hello Cool World recently completed for B.C. Cancer Agency and Pap Awareness Week saw volunteers promote pap tests on Facebook and Twitter. It landed the campaign in the pages of Chatelaine magazine and by the B.C. Cancer Agency’s reckoning inspired 300 “really overdue” women to get the test.

The company is using the That’s So Sexy website to profile the work of doctoral student Cindy Masaro, who is exploring how dating websites affect women’s sexual behaviour. Hello Cool World hopes Masaro will collaborate with the company to explore the effectiveness of pleasure marketing once she’s completed her degree.

“It’s about wanting to actually have an impact on peoples’ sexual behaviour in a sense that positively impacts their lives and makes safer behaviours desirable, not all about disease and dreadfulness,” Dodds said.

crossi@vancourier.com

Twitter: @Cheryl_Rossi