Sex Sells!

Yes, Sex sells. Infact, sex sells a lot! Look around you. Advertisements everywhere compete for our attention. (Levit, 2001) We can’t help but see an image of a man or a woman who are sexualy appealing to us in one way or another. Sex appeal improves the effectiveness of an advertisement mainly because, we human beings are attracted to sex. It’s just the way we’re created.

A good looking woman is more likely to grab a guy’s attention compared to a puppy, regardless of how cute it may be. (Levit, 2001) The advertisement is also likely to attract a fair share of female audience with the advertisement potraying the dream body or a fantasy hairdo which leaves many women drawn to the advertisement.

Document deisgners strategically places various elements in a document to highlight the intended object which serves to grasp the attention of it’s auidence. Various elements of a document contain different degrees of salience and attracts its audience as far as its capability. (Walsh, 2006) In this case, companies incorporate images of sexually appealing images to appear salient to ensure the audience is ensnared. Salience is created through relative choices in color, size, sharpness and placement. Often, vectors created by the shape and placement of elements help lead the eye from one element to another, in order of decreasing salience such as the image below. (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1998)

In order to ensure that the audience is fixed on its intended target, a document designer would faithfully ensure the size of the salient object dominates the picture. It is safe to say that you will never see an image of a bikini model on the cover page smaller than another element in a document.

It is also important that text and visuals are orchestrated together harmoniously to complement each other to bring out the best of a document. (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1998). Even with sexually enticing images, advertisments would not attract or sell if the combination of text and visuals are not binded apropriately. Hence it would work otherwise and appear as a sexually offenseive image.

For instance, in The Unitend Kingdom, posters for an energy drink were banned due to complains that the advertisement promoted sexual violence. (Bbc News, 2002)
The drink's maker Shark AG, told the ASA it used the idea of a shark attack "because it combined a humorous reference to the product and a light-hearted word play on the colloquial term "sharking" - or the search for a partner. (Bbc News, 2002)

The wrong combination of text and visuals would destroy the message that the document attempts to portray. So does sex actually sell?
It does if you know the right recipe of text and visuals.


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References

Bbc News, 2002, 'Sexually offensive' drinks ad banned, viewed 31st October, 2007 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/uk/2087060.stm>

Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T 1998, ‘Chapter 7: Front pages: (the critical) analysis of newspaper layout’, in Bell, A & Garret, P (eds) 1998, Approaches to media discourse, Blackwell, Oxford,

Levit M, 2001, Ezine Articles, Sex in Advertising: Does it Sell?, viewed 30th October 2007, <http://ezinearticles.com/?Sex-in-Advertising:-Does-it-Sell?&id=14551>

Walsh, M 2006, ‘The ‘textual shift’: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy