Does sex really sell? Certainly marketers of everything from corn chips to mufflers think it does. In “The Erotic History of Advertising,” author Tom Reichert examines everything from Civil War-era tobacco ads featuring nude women to sexy banners advertising online casinos. Reichert, a professor of advertising at the University of Alabama, spoke recently with Media Life about why erotic ads do or don’t succeed, how they affect our experience of sex and how far one fashion designer was willing to go to catch shoppers’ attention.

   That’s a good question. 
   As we know about advertising, it depends on what your goal is. Some people just want to stand out. 
   Take the Miller Lite catfight commercial that’s been running for about six months now. Their goal was to create buzz, to create attention, and I think it was very successful with that.
   Most of my research has been what we call effects research, what kind of responses do people have to sexual images, and we can kind of control that in the laboratory. 
   It’s kind of inconclusive, so what I wanted to do was go back through time, look at case studies, look at some of the sexiest, most provocative campaigns in history and see what the real-world data says. 
   While it’s really tough to control all the extraneous influences, there’s definitely a case to be made that sex does move product.
   As far as some good examples, I just keep coming back to Victoria’s Secret. I don’t know exactly how many different brands of intimate wear there are, but there are a lot, and you can position them a lot of different ways. 
   I think The Limited bought Victoria’s Secret in 1984 for like $3 million or something, and today they’re like a $3 1/2 billion company, at least in sales, and I’d say that’s totally built on the backs – and, I guess, fronts – of supermodels.
   They’ve totally positioned themselves as glamorous and sexy, and I don’t think there’s any other way that you can think about Victoria’s Secret. Their catalogs, their primetime specials, their Super Bowl commercials – everything is about looking good and being erotic, and I think it’s really paid off.

   I think there’s a lot of different things that come into play. It depends on the target audience, for instance.
   Guys respond to a different type of appeal, probably more visual, more graphic – more nudity, I think, than what appeals to women. It’s kind of a stereotype, but I definitely think there’s some truth to it.
   I was interviewing the Sinclair Intimacy Institute. I don’t know if you know who they are, but they run a lot of full pages for this sex-help video series, the "Better Sex" video series. 
   They’re pretty legitimate as far as that type of thing goes, and they run probably $3 million or $4 million worth of business in the New York Times Book Review, Cosmo, a lot of legitimate publications and mass consumer books.
   I was in there talking to the marketing director and she said that there’s a double standard. A lot of things that would pass for a fragrance ad or fashion ad in terms of sex appeal get denied when they try to run them. If you’re trying to sell something that’s related to sex, you can’t do it. 
   But if you’re doing it for fashion, or fragrance, or whatever, it’s okay. If you go back and look at condom advertising as well, they’ve hit the same wall. And this marketing director said that as far as their ads go, the sexier the better – the hotter the ad, the more response they get. But they’re directly related to sex. 
  I think what happens with fashion and fragrance and that other stuff is you really start to run the risk of turning people off the more sexy you get. 
  There’s kind of a middle ground that’s probably best.

   I was floored myself when I saw those ads, a lot of which came from the National Archives at the Smithsonian. I was amazed.
   They had ads from the '30s with basically full nudity, and I couldn’t get permission to put some other things in there that definitely would have captured a reader’s attention.
   Those images with full nudity and a lot of suggestiveness appeared in a lot of trade publications and on calendars. They really weren’t for mass consumption. They showed up in Industrial Weekly and Product Management Quarterly.
   If somebody was showing a little bit of skin in the old days, it probably got the same reaction as it does today when we see something that’s really provocative. 
  If we went back in time and showed them some Calvin Klein advertising, they’d probably fall down dead. But I was really amazed by what was out there, and I think a lot of other people will be, as well.

    I think the roots of it are in the sexual revolution of the '60s and early '70s. As I was structuring the book, I was thinking in terms of quarter-centuries, and when I got from the '50s to about 1975, I noticed a real shift in what was acceptable and the blatantness of appeals.
   I don’t know if you can point to one particular turning point, but there was a Noxema ad that ran for the first time in 1966 that had Gunilla Knutson, a former Miss Sweden. 
   The theme was a striptease, and what she said was “Take it off. Take it all off.” And it’s about taking off the whiskers, but there’s definitely a double entendre, and that’s pretty provocative for the mid-'60s. A lot of stuff started to open up about then.

   What I’ve been reading is people are saying here and there, "Hey, we’re just so saturated with sexy images that we had to use a different approach." Fashion advertising, for instance – what you’re seeing there is a continual push to be more provocative, more avant-garde, sexually taboo – anything from sadomasochism to lesbian chic.
   It’s become so saturated they have to keep pushing the boundary almost monthly.
   Gucci ran an ad in Britain earlier this year that showed a woman pulling down her underwear to reveal the Gucci “G” shaved into her pubic hair. This ran in British Vogue. I can’t see anything like that running here yet, but I bet it’s not going to be long.

   That’s a good question. I’d say both.
   One thing I picked up in doing my research is that advertisers would run a sexy ad and catch a lot of hell about it, and they’d come back and say, "Listen, we just want to be judged by the same standards that entertainment is being judged by."
   I think we’re in a time now when it probably is being pushed by entertainment a lot of the time. 
   I met recently with somebody at Fox who was working on the in-house promotions for a new reality show, some kind of beach thing with a lot of dating and a lot of hooking up. 
   I couldn’t believe how racy these promos are going to be – a lot of people running around with their hands over their breasts and a little box over the crotch. So it works both ways.

   What about Abercrombie & Fitch? 
   What they’re doing is selling a lifestyle, and they’ll come right out and tell you that. It’s kind of a fun, hip, trendy, teen/college look, and if you go through and look at the catalog, half the time the models don’t have any clothes, except maybe the boxers pulled down to show the washboard stomach.
  I think, especially when you’re selling a lifestyle, teens and young people try to emulate that sort of thing as much as they can. 
   That’s what’s held up and shown as popular – this is what good looking, cool people do, and this is what they wear, and if you want to be part of that, you wear some Abercrombie and look like this and act like this. 
   I think kids are probably a little bit more susceptible to that than the older people, so when they’re seeing this over and over, reinforced again and again, I think that probably will have some influence on them in the long term.

June 16, 2003© 2003 Media Life

-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.

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