The Blowfish Blog

Caught in the Net: Something to Sell

My first real grown-up job was as an advertising copywriter for a giant retail store that had its own in-house creative department, and though I fled the world of advertising after only about six months, I still have an abiding fascination with the subject. As proprietor of this little column, I’m pleased to present some recent interesting intersections between advertising and sex:

Abercrombie & Fitch are well known for their ads featuring shirtless men, and their 5th avenue store even has a shirtless male model waiting inside the door to welcome shoppers. The devious geniuses at Improv Everywhere organized a prank/social experiment: how would the people at A&F feel about shirtless customers shopping in their store? They recruited 111 shirtless men with, shall we say, assorted physiques, and sent them out with a mission: to shop normally at Abercrombie and Fitch. Check out their report on the results, complete with photos and video. (Spoiler alert: They all get kicked out, but it takes a little while.)

Inventorspot.com has a round-up of sex-related ads they consider effective, which includes some real gems, especially a lingerie store that used cardboard cut-outs and light posts to create images of strippers spinning around poles on the street, and a particularly reprehensible divorce attorney who combines sexual imagery with the motto “Life’s Short. Get a Divorce.” The same site has another compilation of fifteen ads that prove sex sells, which includes a very strange ad that uses BDSM imagery to sell . . . vacuum cleaners. (The ad selling toilet paper with imagery of a horny couple is also rather strange, but the Volvo ad is really cute.)

Tom Ford has a rather explicit ad campaign to promote his new fragrance for men, featuring images of his cologne bottle covering women’s vaginas. Proving he has a sense of humor, Ford also had a magazine mock up an ad with the bottle sitting over a man’s hairy ass. Snatch and ass: two things every man wants to smell like!

That’s all for now. You may continue shopping. No need to return to your homes.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, 7 November 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Caught in the Net. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.