The Blowfish Blog

Sex and Sales

It’s a truism of advertising that sex sells, and if your product can even remotely be connected to sexuality or sexual attractiveness, that’s a connection worth exploiting. Now, these ads can be crass and obvious, or they can be clever. Here’s some of the better ads (and associated commentary) I’ve encountered online lately:

Prockey Markers! How, you may ask, can you possibly make waterproof markers in various colors sexy? Easy. With pictures of girls in drawn-on bikinis! I confess, it took me a couple of minutes before I realized that, yes, those swimsuits were nothing more than ink and good design . . .

Sports and sex go well together, too — athletes tend to have great bodies, after all. But the French tourism board took a unique approach in its attempt to lure British tourists to their country for the rugby World Cup: Posters of rugby players French kissing one another. Nothing says “France” like sweaty, muscular men making out in a stadium!

Condom ads, of course, have a rather obvious connection to sex, and they often manage to sell themselves with humor, too. Here’s a compilation of clever commercials for condoms. I think my favorite is the one where the loser guy’s penis starts shouting at him and demanding he try to hook up with girl, but there are lots of funny clips there.

WiseCamel.com has an interesting article revealing “10 Sales and Marketing Tips I Learned From Strippers”, from tempting potential customers by giving them something for nothing, to understanding your customer, to branding: “I don’t know any strippers that are named Ethel, Mildred or Agnus. Instead, you will get the pleasure to do business with Cookie, Destiny, Candy, or Raven.” Business students, take note.

Alas, not all combinations of sex and advertising are funny or smart or laudable. Consider this rather heinous Brazilian ad campaign for fat-free yogurt, which features larger women reenacting famous sexy movie scenes, with a tagline that reads “Forget about it. Men’s preferences will never change.” The implication is that women who see these ads will realize fat ladies aren’t sexy, and that if they’re overweight they’ll never get a man, and so they should start gobbling low-fat yogurt post-haste. Grr. Never mind the fact that one of the reenactments is of Marilyn Monroe on the air vent with her skirt blowing up — Marilyn was a curvy woman, after all, and would be considered grossly overweight by Hollywood’s current loony standards for female beauty. And the woman in the American Beauty reenactment ad, covered in roses? She’s way hotter, in my opinion, than the skinny teen in the original. Yum.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, 22 August 2007 at 12:13 pm 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.