Does sex really sell?

Kim Kardashian and Kanye West in a perfume ad for Balmain.

Titillation and standards are a tricky balance in a world of highly sexualised advertising, writes Alan Perrott

After a few double entendres coupled with wanton moaning, we finally get to the point. They're selling engine oil.

Really? Car maintenance is like having sex?

Admittedly, I have seen a British documentary that - in eyepopping detail - dealt with that particular fetish, but I wouldn't have thought there would be enough adherents around these parts to get a radio advertisement all to themselves. And, of course, there aren't; this is yet another squeeze on the rock that sex sells.

But does it? Will those bursts of sexual fakery result in a spike in engine oil sales? And if not, why do the people behind it persist with such lame crudity? Possibly because I noticed it, suggests Auckland University's Dr Suzanne Woodward. Or, to be accurate, because my lizard brain noticed it. That's the zone in play here, the deepest, dumbest level of my mind where the jokes from Mrs Brown's Boys scrabble for purchase and it's especially responsive to any whiff of the primeval top three: sex, food and danger.

So the general aim is to win my lizard attention and hold it with the suggestion of more tickles to come. Okay, that makes sense, but again, will purse strings be loosened? If anyone knows, it should be Woodward, but after having pored over many, many studies to keep her "advertising and society" course up-to-date, she can only conclude there's a 50:50 chance.

Part of the problem, as with anything to do with capricious human nature, is that we're a constantly moving target. "Sex has been used in advertising since its beginning because it can work," Woodward says. "It's strongly linked to the moral phases all societies go through, so what was considered appropriate or too much in the 1870s is very different to the 1920s, when attitudes freed up or even the post-war 1950s, when conservative family values returned. In that way advertising becomes a good barometer of the moral climate because it pushes the boundaries as far as society is willing to accept."

It's a tricky balance though. Too much titillation can not only risk a sanction, your audience might end up too distracted to pay any attention to what you're selling.

The classic success story is Woodbury soap, a product that had traditionally pitched itself on how it defeated nasal pores. But it seems people didn't like other shoppers to think they had a pore issue so the soap languished until their "A Skin You Love To Touch" rebrand in 1910. It was the same old bar, but now it was now wrapped up with saucy images of young women getting skin time with young men, marking the first time basic sex appeal had been turned into the promise of sex if you used the product. It sold truckloads.

As for misfires, well, we've had a few of our own, such as Hell's Pizza ill-fated condom campaign to promote their Lust pizza, but even then it likely worked as an attention-seeker. Let's not forget poor old Clayton's, the non-alcoholic booze that raised a stink over its advertisement's lyric where a woman implored her partner to "put down the bottle, baby and come make love to me". Yeah, they were different times. So different that the offending line was swapped to something about making a cup of tea. And it still didn't sell.

Anyway, the latest to strut down this path has been Wicked Campers, who have sought notoriety through the slogans scrawled across the back of their vans. Again, you suspect they cheer every publicised complaint as another free ad. Good for them, but if this strategy is old, Woodward thinks it's only stepping up a notch: "I think ads are more risque than ever and they feed off each other and into other cultural forms like movies, television programme and music videos."

She points to the established use of sex tapes as branding opportunities and offshore campaigns featuring full-frontal male nudity and women clutching perfume bottles between their breasts. More often than not, such provocations feature American designer Tom Ford and if they reek of megabudgets and decadent chic, they're also obvious in their intent to shock. Google's your friend if you need to be horrified further.

The thing here, though, is when the smut is shot with expensive cameras, fancy lighting and makeup artists and then splashed across a glossy page of Vogue or GQ, this makes it art rather than something a teen would hide under the mattress, and which is also why such ads aren't usually hit with a censor ban.

Much the same argument was used here by long-gone Auckland fashion magazine, Pavement, in response to complaints about photo spreads featuring apparently underage girls in lurid poses. Incidentally, an ad for Italian label Miu Miu was banned this year despite using a 22-year-old model. The reason was that regardless of her actual age, the image had been crafted to make her look like a sexualised child - and that's a prohibition that may never fall.

All of which leaves the sighs and moans of the radio ad about car engine oil I described earlier sounding a little withered.

As ever, we're well behind the main game, so instead of a headless, naked and sprawled Sophie Dahl with only a teeny bottle to preserve her modesty (Tom Ford again) we get boy's own stuff like the Tui ads where dinkum jokers try to steal beer from the gorgeous women working the brewery. "The question with those," says Woodward, "is whether they are ironic, sexist or both. But even if they are ironic they can still be sexist."

She's far from alone in asking. The Advertising Standards Authority was kept very busy dealing with complaints from viewers and groups like Auckland Feminist Action. It looked like an easy win for the critics given the ASA's code prohibition on using exploitative sex appeal, especially when used in conjunction with an unrelated product. What did models in revealing clothes have to do with beer? Lizard brain knows ...

But the naysayers hadn't figured on the ASA's get out of jail card: humour. Which basically means you can get away with plenty as long as there's a schoolboy giggle in it for someone.

One of the big problems for Woodward, though, is the pass that gives to the old tropes of how women should be portrayed, which is typically as a mix of submissive, vulnerable and accessible: "There's rarely an equal partnership between how men and women are presented. Women are always smaller, bending at the knees, laying down or coyly looking over their shoulders. These are shapes that break the lines to make them appear more feminine, and they're usually touching themselves, something we rarely see men doing. This again is the fine line between attracting the attention of the target audience and promoting a brand."

So what do those responsible for such ads have to say for themselves?

David Thomason has been in advertising since the 80s and is now planning director at FCB New Zealand, one of the heaviest hitters in business, and he learned very early how tricky sex can be. One of his earliest campaigns was for Bendon and featured Rachel Hunter alongside sundry models dancing in front of a white wall in their undies. A lot of work had gone into pitching it around fun, health and comfort, along with plenty of female involvement on the creative side, yet there were still complaints that it was basically "sex on TV".

"I didn't get that at all," says Thomason, "because prior to that underwear ads were all about women lying around in shady hotel rooms and they were made by men and were pretty much only about what they wanted to see." Of course, we already had sex on TV, it's just that it was too subtle for most. Haagen Dazs ads essentially suggested the use of icecream during foreplay and if you'd seen an ad for instant coffee where someone was invited around for a cup, well ...

Speaking of coffee, Thomason was also part of Moccona coffee campaign ("Moccona heft heer mmmmm"), which at one level can be seen as a sexually-confident woman on the pull, but it was actually based on the style of French art house trilogy, Three Colours, and was aimed at getting female viewers to identify with and want to be like this independent, self-confident, sophisticated and yes, hot woman.

It was all only suggested: there is no sex and no nudity. "It's the difference between sexual and sexy, about draping a woman in a bikini across a car and something where the sexiness is in the performance, the way she moves, the way she talks. That's far more seductive than nudity," Thomason says.

But then, most ads are pitched at women, who still make the majority of purchasing decisions, he says. And don't underestimate the calculation that goes into triggering such decisions. It's called behavioural economics and essentially about how best to use our lizard brains against ourselves.

In one of the earliest examples of its use, an American ad for Alka Seltzer ran the line "Plink, Plink, Fizz", which seems innocuous enough, except that the intent was to establish the need for two tablets and thereby double sales. It worked too.

Which makes it a powerful tool because, as Thomason says, "the world changes, culture changes, but instinct: that never changes. When I started I had a mentor who told me 'everything is about sex' and I naively took that at a really superficial level, but really, that is the big motivator - it's romance, security, love, whatever, and it's all centered around the survival of the species."

A great example was an ad for T-Mobile that ran during this year's Superbowl. It features Kim Kardashian with a black bandage for a top, talking po-facedly over a soundtrack of heartstrings about the tragic loss of unused data. It played on her notoriety, charity campaigns, her outfits, and her outfits (watch it and that will make sense) but, given the game's male-skewed audience, really boiled down to her breasts telling guys to switch phone companies. Genius.

But something else is happening here as well, which, as Thomason explains it, helps make sense of Tom Ford's antics: Sometimes the advertisement is part of the product. Not everyone can buy a BMW, but the people who do want others to think they're cool and sexy, so the ads reinforce that cool and sexy. Not everyone is interested in Ford's products, but those who do like to be thought of as edgy, notorious and sexy, so the ads ... you get the (explicit) idea.

So the rest of us aren't so much being sold a product as the image of the people who buy the product.

And that (hopefully, says the adman) makes us want to be like them. "So you're selling a thing and an image which is important because we know decisions are predominantly emotional, it's not until afterward that we search for the data to justify them," says Thomason. "You see an ad with a guy driving a red Porsche through the mountains of Europe with a hot girl and you think 'he's driving that and she's hot'. It's not till someone asks you about it later that you start talking about the handling and fuel consumption."

So, how do you think someone who's just bought some moaning engine oil would explain themselves?