Boycotted or Boring: Have Sex(y) Ads Had Their Day? | What's Sneaking Into Advertising, Part 2

The feelings that work in advertising, over and over, are the most basic ones humans have: greed, humor, fear and guilt... and sex.

The purpose of commercial advertising has never changed: to persuade the consumer, or more precisely, to win them over. And the best way to push someone to an emotional peak may be to use symbols to build a connection — borrowing from politics, from sex appeal, from feminism.

Those are also the best vehicles a brand has for showing what it believes. And, unavoidably, its risks.

As we said last year when we launched our "Ad Wars" series: we are talking about advertising, but never only about advertising.

At Paris Fashion Week not long ago, a set of promotional photos from YSL (Yves Saint Laurent) raised a question the advertising business has been asking for a century: does sex actually sell?

This time the argument ran one way — condemnation. The photos, which showed a female model in scraps of fabric with her legs spread, provoked public fury.

Parisians stuck "SEXISTE" stickers — French for "sexist" — on the street posters. On social media the hashtag "YSL, remove your tasteless ad" went around. And after more than 120 complaints, France's advertising regulator, the ARPP, told YSL to pull or change the campaign as soon as possible.

One tweet dug up a YSL ad from 1967 that captured what the protesters felt: a model in the house's signature "Le Smoking" tuxedo, cool and entirely self-possessed — the opposite of today's "sex object" ad.

During the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and '70s, YSL did become famous for putting women in formalwear that had been reserved for men. But the comparison takes one chapter for the whole book. For a luxury house with 55 years behind it, that is plainly only part of the story, and YSL has run plenty of ads bolder than this one.

"Seriously, is this what counts as pushing it?" Zhao Xiaofei, executive creative director at BBDO Shanghai, told QDaily. In his view the YSL campaign is not a good ad, but it is certainly not a bad one.

So has the world turned more conservative? Plainly, bare sexy advertising no longer hits the way it did years ago. YSL also picked bad timing: a new wave of feminism had risen after Trump took office, and the campaign went up on the eve of International Women's Day.

Vivian Yong, creative director at Wieden+Kennedy Shanghai, explained it this way in an interview with QDaily: "As Oscar Wilde said, 'Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.' Sex is politics too. Use sex appeal in an ad and ignore the politics underneath it, and you easily get the opposite of what you wanted."

In fact, precisely because people are now more alert to the politics under sex, many brands that once used sexy advertising to stamp themselves on consumers have started to fall in line. Falling in line usually means being boring — not good, not bad.

Calvin Klein, which has been teasing its audience since the 1980s, built last year's campaign around the line I ________ in #mycalvins, shot with Justin Bieber and Klara Kristin. Critics called it "lacking in humor, attitude and creativity — the fill-in-the-blank ad reads like a third-grade reading comprehension exercise."

Mark Duffy, a well-known American advertising blogger, recently published a piece attacking today's fashion ads as "idealess". He hates the multi-minute model mini-films. He hates H&M's She's a Lady ad and thinks there is nothing new in it. CK's campaign only confirmed his verdict that "people in fashion have run out of ad ideas" — and all of it has left him missing American Apparel's soft-core ads.

Fashion brands are not the only ones going careful. At this year's Super Bowl, the liquor and car brands most likely to reach for a sexy woman skipped the innuendo altogether and took up immigration, anti-war feeling and feminism instead. (For why those ads turned so political, see the first piece in this series.)

By contrast, some reliably dull packaged-goods brands quietly cut loose: kitchen cleaner Mr. Clean shot a bald, muscular man flirting with the women watching, and Coca-Cola's latest marketing dropped "share happiness" in favor of a sister, her brother and their mother all making eyes at a sexy pool boy.

It did not used to work this way.

Before the millennium, the big fashion billboards on city streets carried far fewer celebrity faces, and the bodies of anonymous young women in American Apparel ads kept pushing how much skin an ad could show. Brands with a reason and brands without one put beautiful women in their advertising, and nobody fussed. The adman David Ogilvy had long since boiled ad creative down to the 3 B's — Beauty, Baby and Beast — and beauty came first.

Trace it back far enough and the first sex-appeal ad in history dates to 1871, when Pearl brand cigarettes printed a half-nude goddess on the pack, with no subtlety at all.

A crowd of tobacco companies followed. In 1885, Duke & Sons printed a run of sex-symbol actresses on its cigarette packs and gave buyers the urge to collect them. Cigarette packaging in China went the same way: in old Shanghai during the Republican era, cigarette marketing leaned on pictures of alluring women, qipao and swimsuits, East and West mixed together.

It is not hard to understand. For the men who made up the cigarette market then, arousal came with an immediate urge to buy. Put scientifically, the "lizard brain" — the part that runs our primal impulses — takes over the moment it picks up a sexual cue.

The men's magazines Maxim and FHM ran repeated cover tests, and the results were clear: issues with a half-nude woman on the cover sold far better than issues with a male celebrity, even when the copy about that celebrity was exactly what male readers wanted to read.

In an age when images were not yet so cheap and so instant — and the threshold for arousal was not yet so high — everyone wanted a cut of that primal urge: cigarettes, clothes, cars, drinks, fast food, even phone service, whether or not the product had much to do with it. See Paris Hilton and Burger King.

The business that has leaned on sex appeal hardest is, of course, fashion. The elements you see most often in luxury advertising are the hunger for power, for freedom and for sex.

In 1954, Marilyn Monroe needed one sentence to make Chanel No. 5 a permanent synonym for sexy: "I only wear Chanel No. 5 to bed." It is probably the sexy-marketing moment people remember best in fashion. It struck something in countless men and women, and countless perfume ads since have tried to produce the same illusion.

If the Dior J'adore campaign fronted by Charlize Theron was still on the restrained side, Gucci Guilty's 2016 short film, in which Jared Leto shares a bath with two actresses, went much further. But the formula for making the dream never changes: an immaculately sexy star turns even more alluring after the perfume, or the ad hints at the romance that follows. Nobody likes being alone — and how many sex symbols stay single?

Of all the fashion brands that have played sexy in their advertising, the classic is Calvin Klein. In the 1980s a TV spot starring Brooke Shields, then a 14-year-old child star — "You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing." — set the tone for everything the brand did afterward.

CK started out selling women's coats. American fashion at the time was either copying Paris or stacking up cultural symbols — plenty of clothes echoing the hippies and Vietnam — and CK's plain, spare style found a market. Its advertising only turned "sexy" once Calvin Klein himself moved into jeans. Jeans were then as hot as sweatpants are now, and the market already had big names like Levi's. To make noise, CK made the ad above, which went straight into the history books.

After that CK seemed to get hooked. Its models wore less and less, and the brand's sharp, unmistakable image was built through one controversy after another — helping along the way to make sickly-thin beauties like Kate Moss a fixture of fashion advertising. In 1995, CK cast several underage models in a jeans campaign with plain sexual overtones and drew public criticism from President Clinton.

The other figure in fashion obsessed with nudity, Tom Ford, may be the most influential modern heir to luxury sex-appeal advertising.

He happened to shape several mainstream houses, and he produced some of their most contested work. The Gucci he ran published a jolting brand image in 2003 in which model Carmen Kass showed a lower body with almost nothing covering it and her pubic hair shaved into the letter "G." The 2000 YSL Opium perfume poster, which drew 948 complaints, showed a fully nude Sophie Dahl lying on the floor in a pose that left nothing to guess at; Ford was YSL's creative director at the time. In 2007 he launched his own men's fragrance, and the ad that traveled furthest showed a faceless, fully nude woman gripping the bottle between her legs.

Why did sex-appeal advertising flood the market? Loose censorship, probably, and rising wealth in developed countries — the things people buy on impulse tend not to be necessities. And research shows that sexual stimulus really does catch a customer's attention, at least briefly.

Then things changed fast. For luxury goods, which sell scarcity, young people today have already had more than enough "sex."

This February came the first round of advertising overseen by Raf Simons, CK's new design director: no more provocative shots of underwear, no more couples in bed. The first eight stills were set against works by well-known American artists, with models in simple, recognizable CK pieces, showing just enough skin for you to tell it was a CK ad.

Art and human feeling replaced flesh; the inspiration was no longer sex but beauty in a wider sense. This was no accident. In late February several stars of the Best Picture winner Moonlight appeared in a CK campaign called "Revelations," a set of pictures that looked less like underwear promotion than a film magazine's profile of the actors.

CK is not the only one changing. Dolce & Gabbana was questioned over a 2015 ad that outsiders read as a gang rape — several male models surrounding a female model — and has since put its marketing on the traditional Italian family. Louis Vuitton's fall/winter 2013 film was accused of encouraging sex work; the house has grown much more careful.

Skin-deep sexiness finally stopped selling, and Gucci's slow growth said something about that. Alessandro Michele, who took over in 2015, brought the brand back from the dead with a different aesthetic — young, androgynous — and the slightly bookish models in his recent campaigns seem to show how people now understand "sexy."

Fashion's turning point seems to have come around 2013. (WWD asked at the time: "Where Has the Controversy in Fashion Advertising Gone?") Two other things happened at that same moment: fast fashion rose and the classic youth brands fell. H&M, Zara and Uniqlo began expanding hard across the world, while the American brands that had ridden sexy advertising to fame, Abercrombie & Fitch and American Apparel, started down.

Fast fashion does not push sexiness. It aims at the broadest possible public and at international markets — at everyone, fat or thin, pretty or not. Brands like Abercrombie & Fitch, which pushed "beauty" and "body" to an extreme, struck millennials as deeply politically incorrect.

Look at this very politically correct H&M ad:

H&M Fall/Winter 2016 Ad, She's a Lady

That is not to say fast-fashion ads have no sexiness in them. In the womenswear ad above, the definition of sexy has simply widened. In fast fashion, sexiness also becomes a symbol to be punctured: in H&M's fall/winter 2015 campaign, the sex symbol David Beckham and the comedian Kevin Hart wore exactly the same outfit, and it was the joke at perfection's expense that won customers over.

One thing fashion has to accept is that its customers have changed, in who they are and in how they behave. When Abercrombie & Fitch was boycotted furiously in 2013, the boycotters were not parents but the brand's own customers: teenagers, Miley Cyrus among them, spoke up. That autumn, in a Piper Jaffray survey asking American middle- and high-school girls which brands they had stopped wearing, Abercrombie & Fitch and its sister brand Hollister came second and third. The same year, it closed 220 stores.

A 2014 Nielsen report found that millennials care about sustainability and social responsibility more than any generation before them. The pull of "sexy" in advertising is fading, and comfort and health have become what is worth talking about. Two trends in underwear, the category closest to sex, prove the point. Victoria's Secret, built on the push-up bra, has bowed to athleisure and started selling thin, unpadded bras, announcing "No Padding is Sexy Now!" Some lingerie brands have given up Photoshop, and the New Zealand label Lonely went as far as hiring 56-year-old model Mercy Brewer, swapping eroticism for elegance. Of course, Mercy Brewer's figure is far better than most people's at her age — which is, in its own way, another promise of a serene and untroubled life.

So it is less that "sexy" has been knocked off its throne in advertising than that consumers are redefining it. When Kate Moss ruled the runways, skeletal "heroin chic" was a kind of sexy; then one young model after another died of anorexia, and Britain, France and Italy, along with Israel, a country that "produces" supermodels, all banned ultra-thin models. Now that taste runs to "real" rather than "perfect," the bare skin in an ad may well look like the work of this gym, which calls itself the best in New York: the exposure is the same, but behind it are the values the brand wants to get across to you. 👇

Look back over a century of selling with sex and you find people arguing it may never have worked all that well: of the 100 most effective advertisements of the 20th century, as ranked by Advertising Age, only 8 used sex.

It is the Coca-Colas of the world that are letting themselves go. "Nudity is no longer anything to make a fuss about, so packaged-goods brands aimed at the general public can throw sexual elements into their advertising freely," Vivian Yong said. "When fashion, which prides itself on standing apart, uses sex in an ad now, it just isn't that provocative."

What matters is that what puts consumers off today is not sex but the crude use of it, and the disrespect toward women that comes with it. The sexual comedy of Mr. Clean at the Super Bowl, even T-Mobile's S&M-themed spot, showed more wit and more intelligence than a pair of spread legs.

Change, or get smarter about it: sex in advertising should be deft and it should be fun. In the words of the three creative people we interviewed, it is a "double-edged sword," but also "just one of countless ways to be creative." Sex-appeal advertising will keep appearing in the market. What decides whether it is done well is plainly no longer sex itself.

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Does sex-appeal advertising really work?

When is it right, and necessary, to use sexual elements in an ad?

And if you use them, how do you judge how far to go?

Here is what three creative professionals said 👇

Generally speaking, sex-appeal advertising has a fairly good chance of working — after all, "the appetites for food and sex are human nature." Like violence, conflict, life and death, romance and family feeling, sex is an element that always draws attention and discussion, the same way we now go out of our way to chase hot topics when we make content for social media.

As long as it catches the target audience's attention, and as long as it gets the brand's product information across, I sincerely hope more ads use this element rather than fewer.

There is no such thing as an appropriate degree. There is only better or worse execution and taste.

Zhao Xiaofei, Executive Creative Director, BBDO Shanghai

The appetites for food and sex are human nature; sex is an important dimension of being human, and using it in an ad is bound to get viewers' attention and a reaction. But sex is never purely sex, as Oscar Wilde said: "Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power." Sex is politics too. Use sex appeal in an ad and ignore the politics hidden underneath it, and you easily get the opposite of what you wanted. Vivian Yong, Creative Director, Wieden+Kennedy Shanghai

Of course it works. Every element tied to human emotion works in advertising, and "sex" is one of those spontaneous, powerful emotions.

Two points. First, use it for the right reason — meaning it has to be relevant to the category and the brand, not used just to grab eyeballs, which backfires. Cough syrup, please, leave "sex" alone.

Second, use it well. In China, where the culture around "sex" is fairly conservative, using sexual elements means you have to think about how Chinese culture finds "sex" beautiful. Take the bold, direct Western approach and drop it in here, and you will set off a mass outbreak of secondhand embarrassment in the audience.

For me there is no question of degree, only of beautiful or ugly. When you use a "sexual" element in an ad, the thing to watch is that it stays beautiful and never turns "vulgar" — once it is vulgar, it is cheap. Cheap sexual titillation absolutely damages brand power. Pan Sheng, Managing Director, FCB Shanghai

Which sex-appeal ad made the deepest impression on you?

If we are talking about classic uses of sex appeal, Axe men's cologne has to come up. It planted sex appeal in the brand's DNA, not just in the creative work. Wear Axe and even a guy who looks entirely charmless becomes irresistible to women. It is a classic first because it fits the category so closely — you wear cologne to be sexier, don't you? Second, because the consumer insight behind it is exactly right. Heartthrobs are rare; most young men are not confident, and Axe promises to help you seduce the girl you want. That is real brand power. Pan Sheng, Managing Director, FCB Shanghai

The Calvin Klein ads of the 1990s. They used a run of androgynous-looking models and launched a unisex fragrance, which was a fresh approach then, and it broke the rigid gender imagery of mainstream American media at the time.

Vivian Yong, Creative Director, Wieden+Kennedy Shanghai

The tagline of a whole run of AXE ads: The more you use, the more they come.

Extremely politically incorrect, extremely objectifying toward women — and extremely effective, because they are selling to men whose heads are full of sexual fantasy and male chauvinism. Zhao Xiaofei, Executive Creative Director, BBDO Shanghai

Cover image from Gucci and CK