We all know sex sells, that is nothing new. It is often used to sell clothes, cars,
accessories and sometimes video games. But using sex to sell food seem somewhat
unusual especially fast food. Fast food restaurants have had some of the sexiest ads ever
just to promote a new burger or sandwich. The Paris Hilton commercial has become a
prime example. Although a thin model washing a car in a swimming suit may be great for
advertising a new car wash business it is very irrelevant to a big mac. This is probably the
last thing one would think of while hungry. Burger King found a way to relate sex to
being hungry. After watching a few other provocative ads I noticed that they aren't
subliminal at all they are very blunt an open with the relation to using sex to food.
Advertising isn’t always directly about your product but what the product is associated
with. Sex is a universal feel good so in relating sex to food the advertising company
wants us to relate eating their foods with feeling good. Some messages that are put in
advertisements or other things no longer have to be subliminal because sex is not really a
taboo anymore its an open topic that is accepted to where some of the openly sexual
advertisements we have today would not have been accepted in the 40's 50's or 60's.
Sexual ads didn’t gain popularity until the late 1970’s. they are now the most
common way to sell a product. The use of sexual advertisements did not doubled but
triple from 1964 to 1984. While the use of just verbal advertisements has decreased since
this time. Using sex in advertisements used to be a taboo thing but it has very much so
gained popularity over the past few decades. Advertising companies have found a way to
incorporate sex into things that are completely non-sexual.
Burger King in particular has taken food an added a sexual twist on promoting
themselves. One ad in particular that had Paris Hilton washing a car with her body more
than soap an water, an towards the end she eats a burger. I had never made a link with
washing a car with eating a burger. This is how companies target their audiences, in this
case its men. The commercial contains an obviously expensive car an what is portrayed
as an attractive female, two things that interest men. According to www.allbusiness.com
advertising companies base their target on the gender of the who will see the ad, whether
the model in the ad is male or female and how controversial the ad is. These things
impact how the ad is perceived an processed in the mind of the viewer. I am pretty sure
that the thought going through the minds of females and males were extremely different.
While males might have been thinking how sexy Paris Hilton looked, how sweet the car
was and how good that burger would be. Females were more than likely thinking how
Paris Hilton probably has never eaten a burger that big in her life, what washing a car had
to do with Burger King and how women are often used as objects of lust to sell things.
This ad was obviously directed toward the male population.
Besides the openness of sex in ads jingles are used as well as public figures. For
example the BK ad where the girls were dancing in Spongebob Squarepants outfits with
square butts, while the Creepy King sings the revised version of baby got back to sell a
kids meal. Spongebob Squarepants is one of the most popular cartoons out and everyone
young and old knows the “Baby Got Back” song, so to mix these two together targets a
wide variety of people. So using Spongebob to sell a kids meal is inadvertently
predisposing children to get
used to seeing sexual ads at a young age. Even though the ad is selling a kids meal an
adult has to actually take their child there to get the kids meal, an of course while their
there get themselves something also.
Just about every ad has some sort of sexual hint in it. BK has lately had some of
the most blatant use of sex ever. The new seven inch ad advertising the new seven inch
sub they have is so suggestive you do not even have to use your imagination to get the
subliminal message behind the ad.
"Fill your desire for something long, juicy and flame-grilled with the NEW BK SUPER
SEVEN INCHER," it says. "Yearn for more after you taste the mind-blowing burger that
comes with a single beef patty, topped with American cheese, crispy onions and the A1
Thick and Hearty Steak Sauce." Is exactly what the new ad says.
So to wrap it up BK has taken sexual ads to a whole new level. There is nothing
wrong about using sex to sell products, in fact it is very common now. But some
companies have taken the imagination and wondering out of subliminal messages and put
them out there for everyone to know no matter what age, gender, race. Many of the ads
out today only require that you have eyes to understand the sexuality in the message.
Here is one last example, enjoy.
http://randywombats.blogs.abum.com/63422/Banned-Burger-King-Sex-Ad.html
Jen:
Although this essay makes some very interesting comments about how sexualized
advertising has increased dramatically over the last several decades, this focus is not
sustained in any kind of cohesive fashion (in other words, the paper suffers from
major problems of organization, support, and, most generally, focus). Some of the
information you provide here is hard to follow (see comments above), and the
individual paragraphs are not clearly focused on central ideas (as we’ve been
discussing in class these past few weeks). Perhaps more importantly, the huge
number of run-on sentences (amongst other grammatical problems) make this essay
difficult reading; many of the issues (some as simple as capitalization and subject
verb agreement) seem to be the result of less-than-careful proofreading and would
have been easily picked up by spell- and grammar-check in a word processor (and
thus will certainly hurt your credibility with an audience). I’ve restricted my
comments to the first paragraph of this essay as the issues identified there are
consistently repeated throughout the entire draft. We’ll be covering the “run-on”
sentence and sentence fragments in class this week, but I’d recommend you stop by
the Writing Center and/or visit me during office hours before the next project is
due.
Score: 5.5/10