THINKing

Sex Doesn’t Sell

April 24, 2007 on 8:58 am | In Advertising | No Comments

I know you’re saying, “Harry, you’re dead wrong. Sex does sell.” Facts say otherwise.
I ran across this article in Adweek about a study done sometime back on how men and women look at sexy ads differently. MediaAnalyzer used its eyetracking software to see how men and women viewed both sexy and non-sexy advertising.

While more than 48 percent of men in the study reported that they liked sexual ads (the rest of the men were lying), only 8 percent of women said they liked them. Guess what? Very few viewers of either sex (only 9.8% of men, 10.8% of women) could remember the brand associated with sexy ads.? Of course, it wasn’t much better with non-sexy ads: 19.8% recall of brand for men, 22.3% for women.

Moral to this story. Advertising doesn’t work very well with or without sex.