The Super Bowl has come and gone again this year, proving that every now and then, there can be something more entertaining than TV spots. Good for football…bad for advertisers. This year’s crop of Super Bowl ads were ran the gamut from not bad to Gawd-awful, with a few stops in-between. One of the notable losers this year was GoDaddy, who, once again, trotted out “controversial” as their ad strategy.
Sex sells, they figure, and being controversial gets you noticed, so why not put together an ad campaign that gets free publicity from the controversy (like creating ads the network won’t run, then trumpeting the fact all over the news). Besides, football is a guy thing (primarily) and guys love locker-room humor (everywhere), large breasts (on women), innuendo (and double-entendre…even if they don’t know what they mean), and…sex. After all, the strategy worked last year…and the year before…and the year before that… Read the rest of this entry »
Sex is not the first thing I’ve thought of, when it comes to fast food – particularly not in relationship to Arby’s. The roast beef vendor is to fast food what the guy is at your 20th high school reunion, who’s name you can’t remember – he didn’t letter in anything, had no real accomplishments, but somehow, seems somewhat familiar, even 20 years later. You just don’t remember why.
Arby’s has an identity problem, in marketingspeak. (You’d think that being the last franchise standing that features “roast beef sandwiches” – as opposed to burgers or fried chicken – would be enough to stand out. Apparently not.) So, of course, their answer is to take the low road and use sex to sell sandwiches. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s no big secret that sex sells. What’s surprising though, is when a well-known, established brand, with products presumably in demand, resorts to using sex alone to sell it’s products. Exhibit A: Levi’s. The latest spot from the bluejeans moguls has two twenty-something impossibly beautiful people (both in Levi’s, natch) ascending the stairs on their way to what is obviously a “hook-up” (i.e.: meaningless sex between two people that barely know each other). The young man admits “I’m not really in a band.” The girl offers “I’m not really work for a lable.” The conversation continues, with each fessing up to lies they’ve told earlier. The denouement (if you can call it that) comes when he says, “truth is, I’ve been sleeping in my car.” As she strips down to her skivvies, she airily replies, “that’s okay…this isn’t really my apartment,” as the boy switches on the lights to reveal they are indeed in someone else’s apartment.
Pause with me for a nanosecond, whilst we ponder how many ways this ad trashes just about every moral value I can think of. Read the rest of this entry »
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