In Fiat's new ad, a small (wimpy?) man spots a woman bent over on the street, adjusting her shoes. He stares. She spots him, and launches into him in Italian. And then things get sexy...
From Sociological Images:
The woman is “portrayed as a foreign beauty…exotic and coveted.” An Italian car literally becomes a sexualized, sexually aggressive Italian woman, available for “our own advancement in our ethnosexual adventures.”
Newsletter signups are the go-to booth marketing technique and also one of the hardest publicity pushes to follow through on.
Staropramen, a Prague-based brewer, made the typically dull process interesting. Robofun Create helped them build a keyboard out of beer cans connected to a large wall-mounted plasma screen.
According to Robofun Create, every single conference attendee tried the keyboard and entered the contest. Impressive, if it's true.
Target's new Des Moines-focused boards compelling metro residents to buy groceries in the 'burbs aren't new but they've finally hit a level of wrong-overload in our offices. The "Fresh from East to West" board heavily features non-regional avocados, lemons, bananas, and sparks a little bit of cognitive dissonance in a city with a pretty solid agricultural foundation.
But it's "Make a D-Line to fresh" that really grinds our gears. Since the D Line doesn't even deliver passengers to Ingerdahl's, invoking the name of the downtown-only bus line to make a pun about suburban grocery giants is wonky, and it smacks of a lack of local cultural knowledge.
If you were asked to write better copy to activate a "Target and Des Moines: together forever" spirit, where would you start?
The Pleasure Project, the non-profit behind new ads which celebrate sex instead of using scare tactics, operates under the motto, "Putting the sexy back into safer sex."
It's a great example of choosing to focus on the positive in order to change minds, and it's a very direct approach -- using sex to sell safer sex aids. The Fast Co article comes with surprising data, too.
Dr. Lori Scott-Sheldon of Brown University and the Miriam Hospital recently led a meta-analysis of educational, psychosocial, or behavioral interventions eroticizing safer sex. The analysis looked at the outcomes of such interventions: knowledge, attitudes, intentions, frequency of sex, and condom use. Dr. Scott-Sheldon and her team reviewed 19 studies and 36 interventions that used eroticism to promote safer sex among 5,000 “emerging adults.”
“It was really appalling that, after looking at 20,000 studies, we could only find 19 that explicitly employed eroticism,” said Dr. Scott-Sheldon. She acknowledged this limits the value of the findings, and also shows how much more research is needed, especially for at-risk populations.
We'd much prefer wordless, erotic commercials over the campy or sexist fare Trojan brings to the table.
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