SEX IN ADVERTISING, REVISITED
I'm a Bruncher. It has to be said, I Brunch. And I'm not talking about late breakfasts. There's an internet forum I belong to, and for reasons really not interesting enough to take the trouble to explain, we call ourselves Brunchers. I believe I mentioned it briefly last year. It's a forum for humour and argument, and I spend a lot of time playing games there. So much so in fact that I have earned the board title of 'self-made addict' an honour bestowed on very few. But I digress. A nice thing about this of course is that you meet people. Well, you don't exactly meet people. In fact you entirely fail to meet people - though Brunchers in the States and in Britain manage to get together sometimes, I'm the only one in Ireland. But you get to talk to very interesting people a lot. I've now got a sort of cybernetic pen-pal, a girl in Israel called Pesk. (Not, that's not a typical Israeli name, it's a board nick.) By one of those odd but utterly meaningless coincidences, she's exactly half my age - or rather she will be, on our next birthday. That's right, we share a birthday. If there's anything in astrology she should therefore have much in common with me. Like, to take a purely random example, be able to speak some German. Oh she does! It's all in the stars, I knew it.
Of course that doesn't tell you how old she is, because you don't know how old I am. Probably. I'll give you a clue. I'll be twenty-one on my next birthday - on Mars. Yep, years on Mars are longer. It's further from the sun than Earth and so takes longer to go round, (Kepler put it a little more elegantly I think), therefore in Martian years I'm younger. That's what I'm going to say next time someone asks me how old I am. "Twenty-one - on Mars."
(Incidentally, I just mistyped that as 'Marian years'. I wonder how old I am in Marian years?)
Anyway, because I've got some of these columns up on my site now, Pesk was able to read the one I did a month or two back on how there's so much sex in TV advertising. She raised the point that according to some research she read, sexy advertising actually doesn't work. People are so distracted by the imagery they forget what the product was... From my own experience that seems to be true - I can remember lots of images of barely-clad women, but what were the products? Er... Women's stuff. Which is a point which I don't know if those researchers took into account - these days it's mostly adverts aimed at women you see the barely dressed women in, so this presumably only distracts a relatively small proportion of the potential market - lipstick lesbians.
Another problem of course is, how do they really know that these adverts are failing? As they say in the industry, half of all money spent on promotion is wasted - it's just that nobody knows which half. They can focus-group the ads of course, but that's not a real world situation. Perhaps people asked afterwards do remember the product name less well if the ad was sexy. But how do we know it hasn't sunk in at a more visceral level? The same people may find themselves unaccountably aroused when they come across the product again in the supermarket. That could be extremely inconvenient.
But if this research is correct, why do they make so many sexy adverts these days? (And even if it isn't, why do they use scantily clad women in adverts aimed at women?) I think there can only be one answer.
Because they can.
Think about it - if you're in the advertising business, whether commissioning ads for your company or making them for clients, and you can choose anything you want, would you turn down the opportunity to use some scantily-clad attractive people? I think not - because this will bring some glamour into your tawdry little life. Let's face it, you work in advertising. You have all the depth and sensitivity of a crushed can. You're probably even thinking that if there are good-looking girls in your ad you might even get to meet them.
God you disgust me.