At Melon Mobile, we have never been big on the sex sells premise. Not that we do not believe in it, but it rarely seemed appropriate for the kind of products we create and market. We do know that advertising and sex work together well, though (some good examples here). Around 20% of all ads use sex, according to the book Sex in Advertising: Perspectives on the Erotic Appeal.
But why are there so many ads using sex? Is it really boosting sales more than other kinds of appeal?
One explanation based on science research points at the adrenaline rush we get from all the excitement: Seeing an attractive man or woman in an advert excites the areas of the brain that make us buy on impulse, bypassing the sections which control rational thought. Source: Dailymail.co.uk
No wonder there is a sexy flesh-showing lady or gentleman in almost every magazine and billboard selling you anything from shampoo through pots and pans to mining equipment.
Out of curiosity, a few weeks ago we published a Facebook campaign for the latest update of our GPS Voice Navigation Windows Phone app. This time we decided to try something different and launched two parallel ads with the same copy. Both ads targeted the same number of people, from the same set of countries, same age, and with the exact same interests. The only difference was the pictures we used. Their concept was the same – show a segment of a road in the back pocket of a person, to go with the ad title “Get the road ahead.”
In the first image, the road segment was placed in the back pocket of a woman in tight jeans. Quite sexy. In the second one, the road was in the back pocket of a man:
Which one do you think got us more clicks for less money, and which one had double the click through rate (CTR) of the other?
The image with the woman had a CTR twice higher than that of image with the guy. And so were most of the other ad performance indicators. Let’s put things in context: we are advertising a GPS phone navigation application for smartphones. Our target are early-adopters who read Engadget and the like. Yet the sexy female buttocks showed best results over all the other visuals we used, for example this one which is representative of the app’s interface:
Well, perhaps we should reconsider this whole “We don’t make that kind of apps” policy and go for more risqué campaigns. What would you do if you were in our shoes, considering that this is what our applications portfolio looks like. Would you agree that sex is the advertiser’s best friend no matter what you sell?
-Milena, Nora
