The Blowfish Blog

[Caught in the Net] Tarted Up

The good people at excellent sex blog Fleshbot recently put up a nice little gallery of tart cards, the hooker advertisements you find in London phone booths. (There’s a whole book of them you can buy, too.) They’re a lot more charming than ads on Craigslist or the ads in the back of the free weekly paper, you know?

These rather elemental illustrations of the phrase “sex sells” — in this case, sex sells sex — reminded me that I had some nice advertising links piling up, so here are a few attempts to use the body in all its splendor to make you buy stuff or do things:

The Australian booze purveyor Skinny Blonde Beer has a boob-tastic website, which is fitting, considering their advertising gimmick. Their bottle label features a buxom blonde in a bikini, but as the beer warms up, her bikini disappears, leaving her topless. (Yes, just like those old novelty pens where the clothes on the ladies disappear.) There’s a “six pack” of real women on the website who magically disrobe if you click on a thermometer to raise the temperature. Nice to see the mystic and eternal association between beer and breasts in advertising continue.

While we’re on the subject of beverages, how about a tall cold can of pussy? That’s Pussy Natural Energy drink, so called because the name “shocks and demands attention.” Leaving aside the question of whether the word “pussy” is really that shocking to anyone in their target demographic, if the naming ploy is successful, imagine the names we could see on the sides of cans in the future — Cunt Cola, Anus Ale, Taint Ice Tea . . . the mind teems with possibilities. (I gotta say, though: it’s no Tentacle Grape. Clever beats merely vulgar every time.)

Finally, a little public shaming using larger-than-life body parts. This Chinese ad campaign, featuring giant images of ass cheeks with garbage and sewer pipes emerging from their sensitive areas, is meant to discourage people from dumping sewage into waterways, apparently a large problem over there. It’s a rather more socially aware reason for oversized nudity than, say, a five-story high billboard orgy meant to sell jeans. Not that I have anything against scantily-clad giants.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, 10 June 2009 at 11:02 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.