The Last Advertising Frontier

Adam Glickman has been pushing the envelope since he opened the nation’s first condom store in New York in 1991.

Now, long since he moved to Los Angeles and shut down the brick-and-mortar Condomania shops in favor of going to e-commerce, he’s come up with the ultimate intimate-messaging gimmick. Standing at a restored mansion at a dinner during the global Entrepreneurs’ Organization meeting in New Orleans, he revealed it to me.

Glickman’s come up with a way to stamp images onto condoms, very sophisticated images. In the case of the condom he showed me Wednesday night, the image was, of course, of President Barack Obama.

But Glickman sees the images as a way to get advertising onto condoms. He described talking to Sir Richard Branson, the British billionaire, about the advantages of stamping condoms with Branson’s Virgin logo.

He said the maverick Englishman got a hearty laugh at the idea, but hasn’t bought into it.

In all seriousness, though, Glickman said he got into the condom business to promote safer sex, and has had plenty of success over the years, having become a Global leader in EO, an organization of thousands of entrepreneurs in more than 30 countries who run companies with at least $1 million in revenues.