It’s an old formula, cliché, adage, whatever you want to call it – everyone knows that in the world of advertising, sex sells. Or does it? With more and more research suggesting otherwise, we question whether consumers are growing weary of the constant barrage of buff bodies on display and instead leaning more towards new and inventive advertising styles?
Remember the 1994 “Hello Boys” Wonderbra advert? Of course you do, it is ingrained in our cultural subconscious, forever enshrined as the holy grail of sexy advertising. It increased the sales of Wonderbra astronomically and caused distracted drivers to swerve into distracted pedestrians (apparently). Here of course lies the all important difference, that is, between sex and sexy. A spokesman for the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising has stated that “sexy sells much better than sex”, further adding “the gratuitous use of sexual imagery is a turn off”. The woman in her bra was sexy yes, gratituous, no.
The controversy of sex(y) advertising probably does more for the selling power of the brand than the sex itself, as could be witnessed by the 2000 Yves Saint Laurent campaign featuring a naked Sophie Dahl which was eventually banned by the Advertising Standards Authority. Cries up and down the land of “have you seen that Sophie Dahl advert?” inevitably went up, but the question is – did sales of Yves Saint Laurent perfume increase? There may have been an increase in perfume sales generally, but was the brand remembered upon purchase?
This has posed an intriguing question for researchers and advertisers alike who have recently come to the conclusion that although sexual advertising or adverts appearing in sexually-orientated programming inevitably led to a greater purchase intent, brand recall suffered. The Wonderbra advert may have been successful because the brand was already well established and was indeed known as ‘the Wonderbra ad’ rather than ‘the Sophie Dahl ad’ as in the Yves Saint Laurent campaign. Furthermore, the gratuitous imagery used by YSL may have been a turn off compared to the tamer Wonderbra ad.
Tellingly however, these adverts are six and thirteen years old, a long time in the advertising world. Either the sexy adverts are starting to die down or we’re just failing to pay attention to them anymore. Over the past ten or fifteen years, the taboos regarding sex and sexual imagery have all but disappeared. However, this has not unleashed a free-for-all of pornography masquerading as a selling technique; it seems Britain at least still has some morals. Alternatively, once advertising could utilise all this sexual imagery, the desire and controversy was gone. Once you can have something, you don’t want it anymore.
Many may believe that sex in advertising is indicative of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century society’s hedonistic approach to lifestyle, but can in fact be traced back as far as advertising itself. Obviously these images were fairly tame compared to today’s standards, but were sexualised nonetheless. Back then slapping an image of a scantily-clad sexy lady alongside a picture of your product was a guaranteed formula for sales increase, no matter what it was. Sexual advertising may have had its heyday in the sexually liberated days of the sixties and seventies, and reached its peak in the eighties and nineties, but the slow decline ever since can be attributed to the massive increase in media awareness among consumers, as well as a general feeling of “so what, I’ve seen this all before.”
The clever campaigner needs to think of new ways of grabbing audiences’ attention. If the once fail-safe option of sex is running out, what can advertisers use as an alternative? With more and more sexy images out there but fewer and fewer of them having the same impact they would have had, say, twenty years ago, advertisers must search for new ideas if they are to keep selling us their products.
Perhaps new ways of utilising the power of sex in other arenas can be used instead. Forget the traditional canon of beer, cars and aftershave, Mexican advertisers used a sexy model to promote the protection of an endangered species of turtle; this was shocking simply because the image is so far removed from what would normally be used in this kind of campaign. If all the advertiser can do now is shock, this leads us to question of what sex will be used to advertise next – lightbulbs? Recycling? Stair lifts?
Although it seems shock tactics may be the only way forward, as the years roll by and the shocks get smaller, just what will it take to stun us into buying a product? The advertisers have two choices, either push the boundaries more, or find a new route of advertisement. One thing’s for sure, if the trend continues on in this manner, don’t be surprised if twenty years from now, instead of a young woman cavorting with a sports car inside your newspaper, advertisers will have done the ultimate in shock tactics: tell us what the product is intended for and what it does!
And so to answer the question – does sex sell? In short – yes, but for how much longer?
