Sex in advertising

Sex sells claims the old and undeniably true adage. We are sexual beings. Advertisers use this attribute by trying to associate their products and services with sexy imagery hoping that some of the hotness gets attached to their brand in the consumer's subconscious mind.

However abusing your audience's attention is a dangerous thing. Showing skin to get attention and then trying to sell completely unrelated products like hearing aides, touch-typing courses or car-rental rental services (like you will see below) may backfire. The reader feels cheated and talked down to. Another thing to be cautious about is how much nudity is sufficient to grab eyeballs and what is too much thus considered offending. This is of course a cultural question. Usually the more religious your target market the less accepted it is to show bare body parts. For these reasons one needs to be careful where and how to use sex in advertising.

Yet there are many brands that are brave enough to take the risk and celebrate sex as any other source of joy in life in their ads. Decide what works and what not for you and presumably for the target within this pool of several dozen campaigns collected over the last few years. Check out the images below or watch the video on YouTube.

Food and drinks

Fashion

Automobiles and car rentals

Technology and gadgets

Travel and tourism

Health & Beauty

Detergents

Magazines

Public interest

Various others

Finally this is how you sell lingerie in Saudi Arabia. The campaign is mocking the censorship that exists in the Kingdom.

Totally busted… McDonalds France

McDonalds France / BETC Euro RSCG is copying Lebanese promotional idea…I see it as disgrace from the famous fast food brand o go such low, the featured campaign is in it’s core the same communication tonality is used by Crepway back in 2005.

The McDonald’s France marketing team responsible for the campaign were Grégoire Champetier, Nawfal Trabelsi, Nathalie Le Garlantezec and Amaya Fournau.

Advertising Agency: BETC Euro RSCG, France
Creative Director: Stéphane Xiberras
Art Director: Jean-Michel Alirol
Copywriter: Dominique Marchand
Assistant AD: Pierre Boutin

STC ripps off an ad to mock competition?

I can’t believe it for STC brand to go this low , It is beyond doubt that STC is busted with two major offensive actions, Is STC planner’s bankrupted to the extent of ripping off an ad to mock competition? Hope this get to the ears of Vodafone Netherlands and they file a case against STC Vodafone ad STC Ad

To know more about telecom war in Saudi Arabia, see http://advertiser-in-arabia.blogspot.com/2009/09/competition-centric-strategy-mobily-stc.html

2020 update.

This time STC hijacked a full identity from an American IT company to develop its new strategic move to digitizing age.

Dulux :::Bright idea for paint brand

It’s quite difficult to get excited about paint – hence the English expression that describes a boring pastime as “Like watching paint dry”.

Brazilian paint brand Coral (known as Dulux in most parts of the world) wanted to promote its premium decoration line, “Decora” and encourage people to be experimental with the colour of their walls at home. Traditionally, paint brands sell small quantities of paint as colour samplers, so that people can apply small swatches on their walls to compare different potential colour schemes.

However, it is hard to envisage the effect of an entirely new wall colour from a foot-wide square patch of paint. Coral therefore created a range of light bulbs in Coral colours, which when illuminated and pointed towards a white wall would show people what their room would look like if painted in that colour. These were packaged up to look like mini paint tins and distributed and demonstrated in various shops.

"Here we see a humble promotional giveaway creating a really valuable consumer experience which truly highlights the benefits of the product in a way that doesn't require consumers to get their hands and clothes messy."

BRAND: Dulux

BRAND OWNER: AkzoNobel

CATEGORY: Household Goods

REGION: Brazil

DATE: Sep 2009

AGENCY: Leo Burnett

MEDIA CHANNEL

Royal Mail:::Delivering business expertise

Royal Mail was a company dangerously close to becoming unnecessary. Liberalisation of the monopoly markets meant it had new competitors able to provide customers discounts that it was barred from offering, whilst email and online activity had become the far more popular means of written communication than posting a letter.

However, another significant aspect of Royal Mail business is the assistance it gives to SME owners (Small Medium Enterprise), helping them to grow their companies. Although SME owners are the most receptive target audience to growth messages, as they have a personal commitment to their business, they are also the most difficult to engage with for that very same reason.

To generate publicity, Royal Mail ran an extensive TV ad campaign designed to shift attitudes about what its brand stood for. The TV ads directed people to royalmail.com where they could answer questions and generate a bespoke growth print, including case studies and product recommendations. To further promote the service, Royal Mail integrated its brand with MSN Office space, distributing content through special reports and channels within Growth Business and Fresh Business Thinking.

It also sponsored The Sunday Times’ Fast Track – an annual league table of the UK’s Fastest Growing Private Companies – and their Best Customer Service category. In addition, Royal Mail created a ‘Helping Hands’ channel within The Guardian online, a bespoke area containing case studies and commissioned content in the form of Q&As with business luminaries.

Overall, appeal for the Royal Mail brand has grown from 38% to 55%. SME owners claiming that Royal Mail is ‘providing new information’ grew from 20-47%, ‘better than other suppliers’ from 26-37% and ‘can help businesses grow’ 36-41%. There have been 216,000 visits to the website and, just 5 months into an 18 month campaign, revenue in the sales pipeline is already in excess of the media investment to date.

BRAND: Royal Mail

BRAND OWNER: Royal Mail

CATEGORY: Corporate

REGION: UK

DATE: 2008

AMEDIA CHANNEL

Nortel::: Head to head

Nortel wanted to expand as an organisation but found its core telecoms business was shrinking. Determined to achieve growth it decided to instead focus its efforts on the entertainment networking sector, dominated by Cisco Systems.

With a 74% market share - in comparison to Nortel’s 4% - and an ad spend several times larger than any of its competitors, Cisco could out-manoeuvre and out-muscle the competition. Cisco’s key strategy was to ‘rip and replace’ companies’ existing systems, thereby providing an easy all-in-one solution for the busy decision-makers responsible for the purchase. Nortel discovered, however, that Cisco’s all-in-one solution was ‘energy expensive’, costing considerably more to run than its own offering, and creating a larger carbon footprint.

Its launch took place in the form of side-by-side comparisons at tradeshow Interop, where energy consumption meters were used on both Nortel and Cisco switches. Nortel’s product advantage was accentuated by the strategic placement of Nortel’s booth right next to Cisco’s. Print and TV ads asked provocative questions such as: “How much is your network costing you?” But rather than drive people to a website, consumers were encouraged to enter ‘Cisco Energy Tax’ into search engines. Optimised results would bring up a raft of blogs, IT Papers and Videos discussing the issue. An online energy efficiency calculator allowed IT staff everywhere to determine the potential cost savings of Nortel over Cisco.

The results of the campaign were emphatic. A $2 million order for Cisco was pulled and instead invested with Nortel – and this became the trend rather than an anomaly. The campaign resulted in a 46% in sales, over three times the stated goal of 15%, taking Nortel’s baseline from $722,000,000 to $1,055,000,000.

Nortel "Piles" Commercial



Nortel "Holes" Commercial

BRAND:Nortel

BRAND OWNER: Nortel

CATEGORY: Computers/Software

REGION:Global

DATE:May 2008 - Dec 2008

AGENCY:N/A

MEDIA CHANNEL