toothpaste, jelly beans and the truth about biology
scary but true.. it’s almost end of semester!! i have really focused my energies for this course on highlighting and commenting on sex in advertising, rather than the broader topic of gender differentiation in marketing which i set off to descontruct in the begining – so naive lol. Mostly because advertising is so in your face and so much more interesting!!
So, my aim for the end of semester is to continue putting together my own poster adds and comparing those that use sex to advertise their product, and those that don’t. Which one do you notice first? Why do you think this is? Are we all really just that crude that we see a hot guy or girl and just can’t help but look at it a little longer? … probably.
So this first one is a advertisment for toothpaste, no real reason why i choose this as a product but it seems we can market anything using sexual imagery or suggestions, these two adds could work well together to get this point across, what do you think?
So – what do you think? Which add works better? why does it work better? does sex sell? does sex sell anything/everything?? what do you think when you see this add and the others iv posted up here/ tv/billboard (etc) ..?
I’m sure we’d all agree that using sex to advertise most things is always a winner. Its instinctive – biologically we are programed to be attracted to good looking people, think about sex, and generally just want to have sex. Biologically speaking, we want to have sex so that we can reproduce, so our species can continue to grow, like any animal – we think this way without even trying. But sex is more than just biology working behind the scenes to stop the human race from dying out, its also about an emotional bond between partners and even spirituality. Advertisers use sex on all these levels to steal our attention from the everyday, but how long can they hold out attention before we move on? Do we even know what is being advertised half the time – and does that even matter? i usually find some of the best adds tend to be the ones I don’t quite get straight away.. so this is obviously debatable.
Here is another add iv made recently, it is a prime example of circumstances when sex is blatantly used in advertising and its for no apparent reason…
let me know what your opinion is on the topic, or suggest any adds you think would help this blog!
