Sex doesn’t sell – and you’d be surprised what does

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/23/sex-doesnt-sell-advertisers

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Wednesday was a dark day in advertising. In agencies around the globe, creative teams binned reams of campaign ideas in teary-eyed dismay. Got to get rid of that buns-as-breasts billboard, it’ll never sell burgers. For decades, adland has been a proud proponent of sex; it may be morally dubious but goddamit it flogs things. It seems, however, that the Mad Men may have been shooting blanks all these years: a shocking new study has found that ads with violent or sexual content actually decrease advertising effectiveness.

Sex doesn’t sell? Come again? If there’s any truth in advertising, surely it’s that sex sells? I mean, it alliterates right? It’s got to be effective.

Brad Bushman begs to differ. The Ohio State University professor who co-authored the study explained that sex is distracting to the average consumer and raunchy ads “backfire by impairing memory, attitudes and buying intentions for advertised products”. In other words, the only thing that sex sells is sex. Rather than making risque ads, the study advises advertisers to focus their attention on the G-spots (in the US, a G-rating means that content is appropriate for a “general audience”).

Call me cynical, but I reckon this study might be a rather canny ad campaign in itself, one aimed at promoting abstinence in advertising. Empirical evidence suggests that Bushman strongly disapproves of sex and violence, but strongly approves of prayer. His past studies assert that violent video games turn kids into dishonest monsters with poor impulse control, while praying helps people cope with their anger.

Bushman’s study may be bad news for some in adland, but it’s great news for the online media outlets reporting it. Scientific research of this kind provides a thoroughly academic justification for illustrating your story with copious cleavage shots; allowing the reader to sit back and really absorb for themselves just how ineffectual this sort of imagery is. But if you’re here for the gratuitous click-pics, I’m afraid you will be sorely disappointed. All I have to offer is some dry advertising advice. If sex doesn’t sell, there are a few other tried and tested things that do.

Stimulation of the ventral medial prefrontal cortex

It has been shown that when shoppers see a brand they identify with, their ventral medial prefrontal cortex lights up; this being the same part of the brain associated with reward recognition in drug users. So the lesson here really is that sex might not sell but drugs do. The most effective advertising aims to drive addiction by creating habits and rituals around products that are hard to break. Like breaking a Kit Kat bar for example, or putting a lime in a Corona.

Simulation of Phil Collins via the medium of a gorilla

Sex and sweets have long been advertising bedfellows. Indeed, from a review of confectionary advertising, one might surmise that a woman’s favourite sexual position is on the couch with a bar of chocolate in her mouth. However, advertisers didn’t just pluck this association from their own dirty minds; it is all based on science. The 17th-century Spanish physician Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma, for example, wrote that chocolate “vehemently Incites to Venus”. Which is a rather nicer way of saying “makes one horny”. But that was back in the olden days and science has grown up. We now know that sex is a ridiculous way to sell chocolate, and you should be using gorillas in your advertising instead. “Gorilla”, the 2007 Dairy Milk advert that memorably featured a gorilla beating out a Phil Collins drum pattern, apparently delivered a brand payback that was 171% greater than previous campaigns, delivering a ROI of £4.88 for every £1 spent.

Salivation over porn of the vegetable variety

Last year Bolthouse Farms created a food porn index that looked at the imbalance of healthy food porn versus unhealthy food porn on the internet. The campaign also offered interactive experiences with different vegetables, such as games of “guac-a-mole”. The chief marketing officer for Bolthouse noted that the campaign was “aiming for humor, to make guacamole fun, to really bring to life the juxtaposition of brussels sprouts and having fun with them”. The campaign appears to have been successful enough to be a finalist in Global Effies, the ad industry’s most prestigious advertising awards. So there you go, sex doesn’t sell, but sprouts do. This truly is a brave new world that we live in.