Do advertisements with sex sell?

Do advertisements with sex sell?

Let me make two sweeping statements at the beginning of this column. Whenadvertising agencies cannot think of a good concept, they try and get hold of a celebrity. When the client cannot afford a celebrity, they get a skimpily clad woman instead. I might be generalising too much, but just hold on. Here are a few questions. Let's see how many of them can you answer. Which mobile phone brand doesMahendra Singh Dhoni advertise? Which mobile phone brand does Amitabh Bachchan advertise? Which mobile phone brand doesSaif Ali Khan advertise?

          Dhoni advertises a brand called Maxx Mobile. Bachchan advertises Zen Mobile. And Khan advertisesWynncom Mobile. Now let's be honest. You might have known that Dhoni advertises Maxx Mobile, but the chances of knowing which brands Bachchan and Khan advertise were rather low, unless of course you were connected with the making of these ads in some way.

          So what am I trying to suggest here? Taking on Dhoni, who already advertises more than twenty five odd brands, is a dumb thing to do. The same stands true for Bachchan. It is simply not possible for consumers to associate so many brands with a single celebrity, unless of course the advertisement is able to associate the attributes of the celebrity with that of the brand.

          Like is the case with Binani Cement which is advertised by Bachchan and goes with the tagline sadiyon ke liye. Or take the case of the Virat Kohli and Genelia D' Souza featuring in the watch and accessories brand Fastrack. The youthfulness of Virat and Genelia goes well with the attributes of the brand.

 As Geoffrey Miller writes in Spent - Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behaviour: "Celebrities are portrayed in ads not just for their name recognition, but for the distinctive traits they are believed to have, and these become associated...with the product itself."

          At times the celebrity himself may not be advertising too many brands (as is the case with Khan) but there might be celebrity clutter in the overall category, as is the case with mobile phone brands, with everyone from Akshay Kumar to Dhoni being brand ambassadors. Most retail oriented categories suffer from a celebrity clutter these days.

          So clearly associating the attributes of the celebrity with the attributes of the brand is very important especially if you happen to be thinking of an advertisement for a product which is plagued with celebrity clutter. The days when Kapil Dev just came and said 'Palmolive da jawaab nahin' or when Sridevi danced inside a Cema bulb, and the advertisement worked, are over.

          Now let's look at the second statement I made. Does sex sell? Estimates made in the book Sex in Advertising: Perspectives on the Erotic Appeal suggest that nearly one-fifth of all advertising today uses overt sexual content to sell products. Miller states: "We've done some experiments showing that when men think about attractive women, they intend to spend more money on conspicuous goods (expensive cars, watches, foreign holidays) than on inconspicuous goods (washing machines, shampoo)."

A study carried out by Science Daily suggests that men recalled ads with sexual content more than if the ads were sex free whereas women were put off by sexual content in ads. This explains why so many car ads have sexual content. Brand-guruMartin Lindstrom points to a Volvo ad showing a silhouette of a Volvo's driver's seat with its parking brake sticking up in the air, with the tagline, "We're just as excited as you are".

And if you have always wondered why all the chaddi banian ads in India have a handsome muscled hunk being pursued by a skimpily clad woman, you now know the answer. Deodorant ads fall into the same category, where women start falling over a guy after he has applied the deodorant. At times such ads go overboard with sexual content and are banned. Recently the WildStone deodorant ad, which showed a young woman in a saree running into a young man at a family gathering and being distracted with his body spray.

 Of course if you are trying to sell a condom, sex is an essential part of the ad. Who can forget the 1991 ad featuring Pooja Bedi and Marc Robinson which launched Kamasutra condoms? Even today, most condom ads remain loaded with sexual content except of course the government owned Nirodh, which goes with the song Pyar hua, iqrar hua.

 But sex does not always sell. Take the case with the 'Play Safe' ad of Bisleri, which clearly did not work, because water is something which is bought by everybody. The same can be said about the JK Super Cement ad which had a girl in a red bikini walking out of water ala Ursula Andress in 'Dr No' and then stops and looks suggestively at the JK Super Cement hoarding with a voice in the background saying "Vishwas hai, is mein kuch khaas hai". Sex and celebrities do sell, but it is important to get the context right.