Tag Archive for: Advertising & Promotions

Go slow. Sex in progress.

Marketers have always liked making ads that evoke feelings – be it the warm and fuzzy, cute and cuddly variety or the standard ones – that evoke humour, fear or the oldest feeling among them all – sex.

Sex in advertising certainly arouses – but will the ads arouse an interest to buy, well that’s been a moot point.

Sure, there have been a few brands, here and there, that might have used sex in their advertising to succeed, but in general, most marketing theorists and academicians agree sex doesn’t sell – apart from the ones that certain women sell for a living!

But of late, quite a few Indian ads have been oozing with sex. Not as blatant as it might get in porn films, but certainly flirting with different shades of it. It ranges from the blatant use of couples kissing in Close Up ads to the undressing of a bride in the Zatak ad to girls feeling their essentials in a few other ads that I find difficult to recall now.

Well, that is one of the problems of using sex in advertising. Consumers remember the flesh, fizz and frivolous and not as much the brand name.

There who belong to the ‘sex works in advertising’ school of thought, quote Axe to support their point. Agreed, Axe uses sex. But is it in their advertising?

Think. Axe promises sexual attraction. Period. Except in one or two of their ads, by and large, Axe doesn’t use blatant sex in their advertising. They are smartly left to the viewers’ imagination.

Wouldn’t you agree that’s a smarter thing to do? And more sexier too!

/by

The Power of PR

It’s been a long time since I read ‘The Fall of Advertising & The Rise of PR’ and randomly picked it up recently to read it again.

The title of the book actually is a misnomer. The authors, Al Ries and Laura Ries, are not proposing that advertising is dead and buried. Instead they claim advertising isn’t as powerful as it used to be and should be used more as a support to a well-orchestrated PR plan.

Their theory is simple: Build brands with PR and once it is established maintain it with advertising. They give enough and more case studies of brands that have taken this route: Microsoft, Starbucks, Body Shop, Linux, PlayStation, Viagra etc.,

I would strongly recommend this book to you irrespective of where you are – advertising, marketing or PR. Nicely written, neatly presented with powerful examples…the book could be described with the clichéd word ‘unputdownable’!

And as irony would have it, the next book I picked up to read is an old classic (all classics are old, right!). All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum. A book that became popular not by advertising but by brilliant PR and word of mouth.

The story of its popularity is presented in the front flap cover of the book itself. I quote it verbatim:

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten began as Robert Fulghum’s attempt to write a simple credo. In his capacity as a Unitarian minister, he shared his statement of belief with his congregation and then read it at a primary school celebration. As fate would have it, Washington’s Senator Dan Evans was in the audience. Impressed and touched by what he had heard, he requested a copy of Robert Fulghum’s speech and took it back with him to Washington, D.C., where it was eventually read into the Congressional Record.

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten made its way from Washington to the Kansas City Times, which ran Robert Fulghum’s observations in its Sunday edition. The response was overwhelming.

The snowball of enthusiasm keeps building. Portions of the piece were printed in ‘Dear Abby’ and Reader’s Digest. Paul Harvey and Larry King read it to millions on their radio shows and Southwestern Bell sold hundreds of thousands of copies as a poster to its customers. Robert Fulghum’s simple credo was photocopied, sent to loved ones and posted on bulletin boards at schools throughout the country.

The book went on to sell more than millions around the world. All this and more accomplished without a single shred of advertising!

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