Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [75]
In short, sex in advertising is everywhere—not just in TV commercials, magazines, retail spaces, and on the Internet, but on the side of the bus you take to work, in the aisles of your local deli, even in the airspace above your head. But does sex necessarily sell? How effective are scantily clad models, sexually suggestive packaging, or heart-stoppingly attractive product spokespeople in actually seducing us to buy certain products over others?
In a 2007 experiment, Ellie Parker and Adrian Furnham of University College London set out to study how well we recall sexually suggestive commercials. They divided sixty young adults into four groups. Two groups watched an episode of Sex and the City during which the female characters discuss whether or not they’re good in bed, while the other two watched an episode of the decidedly unerotic family sitcom Malcolm in the Middle. During the commercial breaks, one segment of each group viewed a series of sexually suggestive ads for products like shampoo, beer, and perfume, while the other two groups watched ads with no sexual content whatsoever. The question, once the study was over: What do you remember? Turns out that the subjects who had been shown the sexually suggestive advertisements were no better able to recall the names of the brands and products they had seen than the subjects who had viewed the unerotic ads.
What’s more, the group that watched Sex and the City actually had worse recall of the advertisements they had seen than the Malcolm in the Middle viewers—it seemed their memory of the sexually explicit commercials had been eclipsed by the sexual content in the show itself. It would appear, the researchers concluded, “that sex does not sell anything other than itself.”6
Further research by a New England–based company called MediaAnalyzer Software & Research found that in some cases, sexual stimuli actually interfere with the effectiveness of an ad. They showed four hundred subjects print ads ranging in suggestiveness from racy cigarette ads to bland credit card entreaties, then instructed the subjects to use their computer mouses to indicate where exactly on the page their gaze instinctively migrated. Unsurprisingly, the men spent an inordinate amount of time passing their mouses over the women’s breasts. But in doing so, they largely bypassed the brand name, logo, and other text. In other words, the sexually suggestive material blinded them to all the other information in the ad—even the name of the product itself.
In fact, as it turned out, only 9.8 percent of the men who had viewed the ads with the sexual content were able to remember the correct brand or product in question, compared to almost 20 percent of the men who had seen the nonsexual ones. And this effect was replicated in the women—only 10.85 percent remembered the correct brand or product featured in the sexual ads, whereas 22.3 percent recalled the brand or product in the ones with the neutral content. The research team dubbed this phenomenon the Vampire Effect, referring to the fact that the titillating content was sucking attention from what the ad was actually trying to say.
THOUGH SEX IN advertising has been around for close to a century—a 1920s print ad shows a nearly naked woman hawking Shrader Universal valve caps, tire pressure gauges, and dust caps—when American consumers think of the birth of sex and advertising, a single name often comes to mind: Calvin Klein. Ever since 1980, when a fifteen-year-old Brooke Shields told the world, “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins,” the designer has become renowned