The Problem About Using Sex in Advertisements Essay

Advertisements are everywhere, combining images and words together to create a message to sell a product. The initial impression is that the advertisers are just trying to sell their products, but there often seems to be an underlying message. It is often heard that “sex sells.” So, many advertisers will use beautiful women and men in their advertisements to try to market a product. The hope is that “sex will sell,” and people will go out and buy what the ads are selling. There are many advertisements and commercials that use this approach. Prime examples of this are the advertisements for Orbit Gum and A Diamond is Forever. Also, the commercials for Levi jeans use sex to promote the sale of their brand. As a way to

Advertisements are all over the place. Whether they are on TV, radio, or in a magazine, there is no way that you can escape them. They all have their target audience who they have specifically designed the ad for. And of course they are selling their product. This is a multi billion dollar industry and the advertiser’s study all the ways that they can attract the person’s attention. One way that is used the most and is in some ways very controversial is use of sex to sell products

Magazine advertising share a common message theme: SEX SELLS. Advertising uses sexual content such as sexual or erotic images, and words or phases to attract the attention of the consumer who then notice the product. This form of advertising has been used for centuries dating back to the 1800s. The famous tobacco company W. Dukes & Sons Tobacco, used a strategy to sell tobacco in 1885, by inserting trading cards of sexually provocative actresses into their tobacco packages 3 ( see image #1 4). W. Dukes & Sons became the leading tobacco companies by 1890. How about this slogan “To make your skin flawless” from Woodbury’s Facial Soap company. The soap company was near its end in the early 1900s. To boost their sales, they changed their advertising. They had previously used images of a doctor’s face on their soap wrappers and advertising. Instead, they incorporated images of romantic couples showing attractive, young beautiful women along with slogans as “A Skin You Love to Touch” 5 to increase their sales. This strategy was very effective. The advertisement contained a couple; a young beautiful woman looking straight ahead and a handsome man looking at her. The male model is holding her right hand with his left arm is wrapped around her, holding her close to him. This gives the viewer the idea that the two models are a couple. The slogan in the

Do you ever watch the Super Bowl for its commercials? Have you ever bought a more expensive product because you had seen its advertisement? If the answer is yes, then you might have been a victim of today’s marketers. Jean Kilbourne, the author of “Killing us Softly” stated in one of her lectures, “The influence of advertising is quick, cumulative and for the most part, subconscious, ads sell more products.” “Advertising has become much more widespread, powerful, and sophisticated.” According to Jean Kilbourne, “babies at six months can recognize corporate logos, and that is the age at which marketers are now starting to target our children.” Jean Kilbourne is a woman who grew up in the 1950s and worked in the media field in the 1960s. This paper will explain the methods used by marketers in today’s advertising. An advertisement contains one or more elements of aesthetics, humor, and sexual nature.

As stated by Fite, Fite, Mcelwee, Neal, & Smith (2000) sex in advertising can be viewed as unacceptable and poor in taste by some viewers and acceptable or essential to others. The debatable issue of does "sex sell" has become a great importance to society as well as the advertising companies. Random students at Northern Kentucky University were interviewed by Fite, Fite, Mcelwee, Neal, & Smith (2000), about there opinions of the use of sex in advertising. The students had several different opinions, here are a few examples:

Everyone has heard the phrase “sex sells.” It seems to be a major factor that drives people to buy. Advertisers manipulate this behavior by creating ads that showcase their products as a way to gain love, beauty, and desirability. Advertisers frequently use sex appeal with flirtatious images as an attention grabbing device to play with the public’s emotions. Because the public is a diverse group of individuals, it is difficult to target the masses by focusing on hobbies, sports, or flaws. Because of this, advertisers target sexuality, something everyone can relate to. In the February, 2016 issue of Cosmopolitan Magazine, they overtly demonstrate this. In an ad for Kinky Vodka, they represent multiple sexual innuendoes such as provocative body posing, stereotypical feminine colors, and seductive wording.

The use of sex in advertising as mentioned earlier is said to have boasted a lot company’s revenues, but it also has its negative side which has caused a lot of problems in societies around the world. The idea of using sex in advertising is a very smart way that advertisers use to gain attention of consumers, but it has it's negative effects like depicting women as sex objects, forcing sexual innuendos on children, causing body dissatisfaction among youths even adults and it also attracts negative backlash on the companies that use it. It can attract the wrong kind of attention and sometimes it won't lead to the company becoming a bigger and better brand.

in men’s magazines. While conventional advertising practice increasingly depends upon the aphorism that “sex sells,” conventional mass communications research approaches to advertising containing sexual imagery have assumed that such images do affect audiences and such images portray inaccurate truths to audiences. This thesis, however, makes no claims about audience interpretations or media effects. Instead this thesis looks closely at the visual rhetoric of sexualized images of women used in fashion advertising in men’s magazines to ask how sexualized imagery of women functions rhetorically as part of a branding message presumably designed to sell a product.

Advertising is a billion dollar market with a sole purpose to persuade the consumer to purchase some type of product or service. Companies use many different methods to convince the public to spend money on their products with most of their advertising focused around the idea of “sex sells”. This idea promotes a hunger in the consumer for gaining personal pleasure or acceptance of sexuality by the eye catching effects of publicly baring flesh. These ideas are promoted through TV commercials, billboards, magazines, radio ads, or any type of media targeted at the mass majority of people. Every where a person looks there seems to be some type of advertising based on sex. The illusion of making one feel they want, need, or cant live without

Sexual imagery has been used in advertising for a long time with a great deal of success. With the ever-increasing difficulty of advertisers to gain the attention of the media consumer, the use of both effective and ineffective sexual imagery has flourished in recent years. Some products such as perfume and clothing are relatively easy to sell with sexual imagery. Companies selling products such as fast food, however, must be more creative with their use of sexual imagery. Arby’s Roast Beef Restaurant took such a creative approach with its full-page advertisement in the 2009 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.

In my social analysis, I pointed out the issues on sexualitzation and false image depiction of women in advertisements. There are some action plans that are being implemented in order to alleviate these injustices. In order to diminish the sexualization of women, advertisers are being encouraged by many of their consumers to seek help on what women currently represent in society, to evaluate their ads and depict women as human beings with brains and with rational will rather than implicating that women are just objects. In order to alleviate the injustice of false body depiction on

In advertising, sex is the use of provocative imagery and erotic messages that are specifically designed to gain interest in a particular product. Typically, in ads beautiful women or handsome men are used to lure in the viewer or consumer. A McDonald’s ad from 1977 focuses on selling their product using a family oriented scene. Forty years later, Burger King releases an ad that focuses more on oral sex and degrading women. This illustrates that women have gone from being nurturing figures to sex symbols in advertisements.

In today’s society, advertising plays a huge part in sale production around the world. Advertising is found in almost every place imaginable and even in places a person least expects it. Some advertisements are very noticeable and distinct, while others are very subtle yet the human eye tends to catch them. There are different types of advertisements which include signs, posters, newspapers, Internet, television, movies and much more. Advertisements remain successful by appealing to specific audiences. The audience targeted through advertisements are usually based off of society’s views on the product or what the advertisement is trying to “say.” Advertisements also play an important role in constructing the idea of gender. The idea of gender, usually focused around masculinity v. sexuality in women. A large majority of advertisements in today’s society, convey women as sexual figures, which can be seen as degrading towards women. The advertisement featuring Lucy Pinder for Lynx Dry: 48 hour Anti-perspirant, the company is also known as Axe in the United States, conveys this message. The advertisement was released in June 2011, before being banned in the United Kingdom for being degrading towards women. In the advertisement, the women is shown removing a turkey from an oven, while dressed in lingerie. The advertisement conveys a strong message against women and uses sexual appeal to influence men who value the shown qualities in a women, which are degrading to women. This

One often hears the phrase, “sex sells” when it comes to advertising. This is when advertising is the uses a sexually provocative or erotic imagery (or sounds, suggestions, and subliminal messages) that are specifically designed to arouse interest in a particular product, service or brand. Typically, sex refers to beautiful women and progressively handsome men are used to lure in a viewer, reader or listener, despite a weak a non-existent link to the brand being advertised. If a men is physically fit and is shirtless, many women are going to stop and take a look at the photo, despite not knowing what they are trying to sell.

In terms of women and sex appeal, the world of advertising has changed a considerable amount. Many of the advertisements which are seen in newspapers, magazines, and television fail to portray women in a more positive light. The image of females in numerous advertisements are merely viewed as fascinating "objects" while they are also being displayed in a fashion that is supposed to appeal only to men, i.e. exploitation of the body. Though these types of advertisements are very effective at selling their products to consumers, it seems as if the minds ' of women, especially younger women/teenage girls are being corrupted as they are pressured to live up to the ideal image: sexy and thin with a little extra curves.