The Book Sex Sells!

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Recommended: Dolce and gabbana advertisement

Sex sells a common phrase which turns out to be very truthful and also the title of Rodger Streitmatter's book, Sex Sells! The Medias Journey from Repression to Obsession. It seems like no other human act drives "buying behavior" as much as sex appeal does. Therefore advertisers manipulate this human drive and than offer their products as a path of love, beauty and desirability which is their main purpose of advertising. In other words the main purpose of advertising is to sell products and what advertisers must do to get people to buy these products is to make products desirable to the chosen target consumers. The pioneering of bringing prurience to advertising was Calvin Klein, starting with women's jeans going then to men's underwear and ending up with perfume for both sexes at the end. Perfume advertising is a large contributor to sex appeal. In both ads for Opium and Dolce & Gabbana perfumes advertisers use sexual seduction and influence to sell their product. They use sex appeal to grab our attention and play with our fears and desires and they manipulate us by fulfilling our erotic fantasies and dreams.

Advertisers use whatever they can to attract the reader. From a sexual appealing look to a word. One of the most helpful approaches is sex of course which can capture anyone's attention. The ad for Opium perfume depicts a young brunet that has nicely shaped body and wears nothing but golden slippers, necklace and bracelet. Model is laying down seeming like she is enjoying herself and maybe experiencing orgasm. Again in Dolce & Gabbana ad, we see man and woman having passionate foreplay; with one hand he is pulling her bra strap down while with other touching her breast … and she is taking her panties off. In this ad, the naked female body and idea of sex is used to get the image of their product into the reader's memory. "Newsweek…wrote: The strategy is that, while the consumer studies the picture, the designer's name melts into the brain. And a big part of the message that was melting in was sexual." (Streitmatter, pp. 123) Anyhow, both ads use sexual attention to grab reader's attention. This is exactly what Calvin Klein had intended he wanted to "make sure, first and foremost, that anyone who was thumbing through the pages of a magazine would stop and look at the ads.

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