Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [74]
Decades ago, these ads scandalized many Americans. What’s happening to our culture, people wondered? Is advertising going too far? Are we being corrupted by sex?
But the television and print ads from the sixties and seventies were tame when stacked up against those of today. After all, bear in mind that the female perched atop the Mustang, the Noxzema model, and the airline stewardesses were all fully clothed—even the man shaving was wearing an undershirt. Compare this to the nearly naked bodies that sell us everything from perfume to alcohol to underwear nowadays. Take an ad I saw recently, for example, which featured a nearly naked man with his hands cuffed behind him and his mouth gagged, while a long, limber, luscious pair of shapely legs belonging to a dominatrix appeared behind tempting him with her…German vacuum cleaner. Or the ad featuring another nearly naked man, his briefs tumbling over his loins, a woman behind him caressing his chest in an ad for, of all things, Renova toilet paper. Or the one showing a silhouette of a Volvo’s driver’s seat with its parking break extending in the air—precisely like an erect penis—over the tagline, “We’re just as excited as you are.”1
In 2007, the ads for designer Tom Ford’s new fragrance featured a naked woman clutching the bottle either against her thoroughly Brazilian-waxed, slightly spread legs or between her bare breasts. The same year, a German company known as Vivaeros claiming to have bottled the smell of sex in the form of a “beguiling vaginal scent” released a new perfume called Vulva (I’ll leave the design of the logo to your imagination) and began selling it as a fragrance for men.2
Or consider the ads for two new fragrances recently created by the rap mogul P. Diddy and singer Mariah Carey. P. Diddy’s cologne, known as Unforgivable Woman, was released in the U.K. with an accompanying promotional film featuring a fully dressed Combs and a nearly naked supermodel engaging in, shall we say, intimate behavior (the ad was rejected in the United States because of its suggestive content). Mariah Carey took a more sensual approach: the thirty-second ads for M feature a naked Mariah crooning and caressing herself in the cascading dew of a rain forest.3
According to a 2005 book entitled Sex in Advertising: Perspectives on the Erotic Appeal, roughly one-fifth of all advertising today uses overt sexual content to sell its products.4 If you need evidence, just browse through the latest issue of Vogue, pay a visit to your nearest American Apparel store, or gape at the latest twenty-foot Calvin Klein billboards overlooking Times Square.
Or drop by Abercrombie & Fitch. When I visit the chain’s stores, inevitably, my eyes are drawn to the mannequins in the front windows. It’s hard not to look—the females are all designed with unnaturally large breasts and the male mannequins with an abnormally pronounced endowment. And if men’s jeans or women’s blouses are on display, usually there’s a deliberately placed rip affording a peekaboo glimpse of checkered boxer shorts here, a lacy bra strap there.
But it’s not just clothing and perfume companies using the overt suggestion of sex to peddle their products. One billboard promoting Las Vegas’s Hard Rock Casino features a pair of bikini bottoms lowered around a woman’s calves. The tagline: Get ready to buck all night.5 And what about a commercial for the Nikon Coolpix camera featuring a naked Kate Moss with the tagline See Kate Like You’ve Never Seen Her Before. Even family-style restaurants aren’t exempt. In a witty but salacious takeoff on nonsmoking patch commercials, Nando’s, an Australian chain of poultry restaurants, showcases a naked, pole-dancing mother who’s fighting her chicken “pangs” but, unable to place a patch on her bare, wriggling bottom, has to resort to Nando’s poultry chewing gum.
And let’s not forget Virgin Atlantic’s edgy ad campaigns. Since 2000, British Airways—Virgin’s archrival—has sponsored the London Eye, the giant Ferris wheel and observation booth that sits on the banks of the Thames.