Like all of the 70,000 ground troops who’d be part of the Iraq War in 2003, Rob Seo—part of the Marines’ 4th Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion—saw things he’ll never forget. But today, two decades on, there’s one experience of enduring significance. It’s even informed his work as a chief marketing officer.
Seo remembers one operation where his quick reaction force had moved so quickly that it had outrun its supply lines. Marines carry MREs (meals ready to eat), but Seo’s unit was running out of them. (After it did, “we were starving for, like, a week,” he said.) Despite their dire circumstances, though, one of Seo’s buddies shared what little was left of his food with an Iraqi kid who had nothing to eat.
And that got Seo thinking. “Maybe the perception that I had of what a man is, is very different from what it actually is,” he told Adweek. “The manliest guys aren’t the ones who are big and strong just for the sake of being big and strong. It’s men who use their strengths to benefit other people. That’s what makes them men.”
And that, he added, “is what we’re trying to do with our TikTok channel.”
A bunch of decent guys
TikTok was 13 years from even existing back when Seo was in Iraq, but it’s a big part of his life nowadays. In 2020, Seo co-founded a direct-to-consumer brand of condoms called P.S. As a contender in the $437 million condom segment, it’s no surprise that P.S. does much of its marketing on social media.
But here’s what is surprising: P.S.’s marketing doesn’t make a single mention of condoms or sex. It doesn’t even mention the brand’s name. Instead, for the past year, @PSGoodTimes has been posting videos that feature real-life stories about “ordinary men doing extraordinary things.”
Some of that content is simple, good Samaritan stuff—the guy who frees a sea turtle stuck between two rocks, or three local hip-hop performers rushing to help an elderly woman who’d just collapsed from exhaustion.