Since day one, brands have been using sex to sell their products and spark conversations. It draws attention and plays into our most primal human desires: to be wanted and to be loved. Some brands rely on sexual imagery and innuendo more than others, but the ones that do send the same message: this product will boost your sex appeal. Travel back in time to the s, when women — and their sex lives — were buttoned up. Sure, everyone was having sex, but no-one was talking about it openly. Ads had limited, if any, sex appeal. While the ad linked the soap to sex, it honed in on what women wanted: sensuality, intimacy and romance. As for the tagline, it was penned by a woman, Helen Landsdown Resor. Fast-forward a few decades, and we hit the 50s. The Mad Men era.
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Sex in advertising, a long and complicated relationship.
Sex appeal in advertising is generally viewed as an effective strategy to attract attention to your brand. The pervasiveness of this approach is evidence of the fact that companies believe it works well. In some instances, sex appeal alone is the attention-getter in an ad, while other times the product presents a natural opening for sexual ad messages. For some companies and products, sexuality is the allure used in advertising to draw attention to an otherwise tame product. No company better epitomizes this than Internet hosting services provider GoDaddy.
Does sex sell?
Advertising is about two things: attention and decision-making. Naked men, women, suggestive poses, implied sex - all of it. Not as much as it did twenty years ago, and, of course, not nearly as much as fifty years ago. Sex became overused in advertising. And yet, it attracts our attention on a basic level, the way food does. These are the basic needs that are never completely ignored. This post will be more about how arousal - the ideal reaction to sexual ads - influences our decision-making. In this case, sex-related.
Last Updated on October 11, We are sexual beings, therefore are attracted to sexually related subjects, jokes, and other matters. Many companies use the sex concept in their favor, while adding a humorous element to it. Companies hope that when they create an amazing ad, it will go viral. Some companies use sexuality for their ads because it related to their product. Take for example Durex, they sell condoms so it makes logical sense to include sexuality in their advertisements. Now other companies try to use sexuality to sell their product, but that product has nothing to do with sex. A good example of this matter is the Nikon camera add you will find below, that states it detects up to 12 faces. Nikon is using sex to sell their product. Although the camera is not a sexual product, it can be used for capturing photos and videos of things we will not go into.
