If it’s not on, it’s not on.
This was the slogan for an Australian safe sex campaign in the early 1990s.
Posters carrying it were designed to be stuck to the back of toilet cubicle doors, particularly in bars and nightclubs – exactly where a captive, slightly distracted reader has nowhere else to look. Australia’s National AIDS Campaign, run through the Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Health, first produced the poster in 1990.
Featured on the poster are two uncredited cartoons by Ron Tandberg, one of Australia’s most celebrated illustrators.
It’s a tiny piece of ephemera. But pull it apart and it’s a near-perfect case study in how four ordinary words can carry three different meanings at once… and why that’s a gift for an Australian audience and a trap for anyone pitching colloquial English beyond.
A campaign born from a failure
To understand part of the reason why this slogan worked, it helps to know what came before it.
In 1987, Australia’s first major HIV/AIDS public information effort was the infamous Grim Reaper campaign: hooded skeletons bowling people over in a ten-pin alley, set to ominous music and voiceover. It was unforgettable… and largely useless. The imagery terrified the general public, including me as a pre-teen. But what message it was trying to say was lost by the hyperbole of it all. Despite giving some advice in a manner reminiscent of an old schoolmaster or priest, it was so poorly devised – a scare campaign that trumpted AIDS as now existing beyond the gays and drug users, but ultimately doing little to change behaviour.
And yet, anyone who was around at the time will still vividly remember that ad, even though it was aired for three weeks only. It was supposed to be for six weeks but the campaign was cut short after massive media criticism and a public outcry.
Clearly a different approach was needed – away from fear and towards plain clarity. Plus, a dose of Aussie wit always does the trick. And what better way to talk about what can be a hard topic to raise in the heat of the moment than with some humour to ease things.
“If it’s not on, it’s not on” was the result: no skeletons; no absurdity; just an easy-to-remember and clever instruction. Actually, it came at a time in Australian public health campaigning where going for the colloquial was the way, and successfully at that too. According to the advertising team behind it, the shift worked. Condom manufacturer Ansell reportedly tracked a measurable uplift in sales every time a new burst of the campaign was made.
The man behind the cartoon
The two little drawings on the poster – one showing a man swallowed almost whole by an oversized condom; the other showing him walking off, presumably more sensibly equipped; came from Ron Tandberg, who spent 45 years as the resident political cartoonist for Melbourne’s venerable broadsheet The Age – from 1972 until shortly before his death in 2018. He won eleven Walkley Awards, Australian journalism’s top gong, and was known for “pocket cartoons”: a single, minimal panel that could land a point newspapers needed a full article to make.
So what does “it” actually mean?
Here’s the part that makes this slogan worth a second look, well beyond its place in Australian advertising history.
The slogan itself is genius – it’s based on just the one phrasal verb.
What’s a phrasal verb?
OK, this is more for native English speakers or anyone fully educated in an Anglosphere country such as Australia, where we’re not taught grammar. Anyone who has learnt English as an additional language will know what I mean, and probably rolling your eyes. English speakers use them all the time, and yet, the native ones have very little idea that a) they’re a bugger to learn, and b) they’re so contextual.
A phrasal verb is a combination of a verb and a particle – usually a preposition, but also adverbs, or both. This combination then functions as a single verb and creates a meaning entirely different from the original words. Usually the verb used are basic, single-syllable Germanic-origin words. To give an example, the verb turn means “to rotate”, but when combined with down to form the phrasal verb turn down, it means “to reject” or “to reduce volume”. Then an extra particle can be added to change the meaning again. Take for instance go; if we add off, then to go off means, depending on context: “to sound”, “to explode”, “to stop working”, “to turn off”, “to spoil”, “to lose interest”… the list goes on. But if we add an at after it to form to go off at, then you have the Australian phrasal verb for “to scream or yell at some someone”. Tricky, eh?
In this case, the slogan phrase hinges entirely on the phrasal verb “to be on”… and “to be on” is a small nightmare for anyone learning English because it carries several distinct, unrelated meanings depending entirely on context:
- A physical item is not being worn – The condom is not on.
- An act or behaviour is unacceptable or not permitted – Having unprotected sex is not on.
- An event or action is not happening – The concert is not on. In the context of this slogan, this is the one doing the real work: if the condom isn’t on, sexual intercourse simply isn’t going to happen.
Stack those together and “if it’s not on, it’s not on” becomes a kind of linguistic Russian doll: if it (the condom) is not on (worn), then that’s not on (acceptable) and it (sex) is not on (happening). One sentence, seven words – three of them repeated, three readings of the same two words, all pointing the reader to the same conclusion.
There’s a fourth meaning of “to be on” that the slogan doesn’t touch: an electricity-powered item is operating – The computer is not on. Swap “condom” for “computer” in your head and the whole joke falls apart, which is exactly the kind of ambiguity that makes phrasal verbs so unstable outside their home context.
Brilliant for Australia. Also for New Zealand, the UK and Ireland. A bit iffy for North America, where they don’t always use the same phrasal verbs as in the rest of the Anglosphere. Quite risky for everywhere else.
This slogan was written for Australians by Australians, and it landed because of that. Colloquial, idiomatic language carries a kind of shorthand trust: the reader recognises the rhythm of the phrase as something a friend or a workmate might say, and that familiarity does a lot of the persuasive heavy lifting before the literal meaning even registers.
Take the same slogan to a market where English is a second or additional language, though, and that shorthand becomes a liability. A reader working through “if it’s not on, it’s not on” word by word, rather than feeling it the way, for instance, an Australian does, is liable to land on the wrong one of those three meanings or simply give up and miss the message the poster is supposed to be delivering. A public health campaign that misfires on comprehension is then a failure, not quirky.
Which leaves two fairly clean takeaways for anyone writing copy, slogans or instructions for an audience that isn’t entirely local:
✅ Writing for a domestic, culturally fluent audience? Colloquial language, wordplay and double meanings can work wonders. They build trust and make a message memorable, just like this one – it’s outlived the campaign it was made for by three decades!
✅ Writing for a wider or international audience, including readers with English as an additional language? Trade the cleverness for clarity. Use specific, single-meaning verbs. And I’m not talking about the misnomer that is “plain English”. To eliminate is clearer than to take out, even though the former, like most Latin/French-origin words in English, tend to be more formal. “Use a condom” will never be as memorable as “if it’s not on, it’s not on”…. but it will never be misread, either.
For anyone who regularly communicate in English with people who are native in other languages, be careful when using phrasal verbs – they deserve a little more suspicion than they usually get. They’re so embedded in native speech that we rarely notice how many jobs a single one is doing. Context is doing all the disambiguating, and context is exactly the thing that disappears when a message travels.
Three decades on, the poster is mostly remembered as a curiosity of early-90s public health design… but the slogan is a brilliant lesson in word play and how much weight a phrasal verb can quietly carry.
Oh yeah, and if it’s not on, it’s not on!
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