In advertising, it’s the gospel truth: Sex sells.
You’ve heard it a million times. So many times it’s gotta be true, right?
Hell, even the Devil himself says it’s true in our second of seven Responsible Marketing web shorts, here:
Why not believe it? You just heard it from the Devil himself.
Well, because it’s all a lie.
Sex sells sex.
Sex gets attention.
And sex creates controversy.
But it seldom converts attention to action.
And most people don’t recall the brand the ad was for.
Men respond better than women to sexy ads, as expected. But in Buyology, author Martin Lindstrom shared this interesting tidbit: One study found that even for men, recall for sexually explicit ads was less than 10%, but recall was nearly twice that for the non-sexually charged ads.
Steve Hall of Adrants puts it perfectly when talking about sex in advertising call it:
. . . a lame cop-out used by marketers who lack imagination to create more compelling work that will sustain itself beyond the initial titillation.
I couldn’t agree more, but what do you think?
