Smoking Kills, Sex Sells
How Cowboys and Genitalia sold cigarettes. — and no, I’m not blowing smoke up your ass.
“Sex sells”, a phrase seemingly as old as time, well at least to me at 22 years old, I don’t know of a time before this. According to Yahoo answers — reputable, I know — Hugh Heffner first coined the phrase in defence of Playboy Magazine, and he was in a Weezer video so it must be true.
In today’s blog, I will be looking in particular at two different cigarette brands — Marlboro and Silkcut — and how each company used sexual desire in contrasting ways to sell the same product.
I’ll start with the obvious one; Silk Cut. Silk Cut famously used a beautiful piece of silk on a white background with a slice in the middle of it as their advertising campaign in 1995 (image above). But what made this effective? The fabric is not a garish colour, the product not bold or shown. More so, we are presented with a yonic image, the female genitalia represented in a harsh gash on beautiful fabric, a sub conscious pull to humanities most primal desire. Of course, you may be unconvinced this is representative of the female vagina at all, to which I say “nay!” for this advert, designed by Charles Saatchi himself, was entitled “Silk Cunt”, AND THAT’S A SEX WORD.
Silk Cut rode the success of this campaign further, showing phallic objects such as scissors and oil cans positioned next the fabric, leaning even more crassly into the whole “selling sex” schtick. In the above case, we see a joining point of two objects; the phallic scissors inside of the beautiful silk.
See, the whole semiotics of advertising can be boiled down to two categories; Metaphorical advertising and Metonymical advertising. Silk Cut use metaphors, images of yonic and phallic objects in unison to appeal to sexual desire, whilst Marlboro use metonyms, they sell a desirable lifestyle.
With Marlboro, we can see the heavy use of famous “Marlboro Cowboy”. The idea behind it is that the cowboy represents “peak masculinity” — in outdated and problematic terms, sorry — all men should desire to be like this macho stereotype and all woman should desire this macho stereotype. Therefore, by allying their product so strongly with this image, we are being told that if you smoke Marlboro cigarettes, you will appear as this macho, muscular, sexually charged image of masculinity. So, in case you missed it, smoking cigarettes makes you at least 1 cowboy more attractive, either that or you are smoking genitalia — I mean, you are literally sucking on it.
But what does this mean in the bigger picture?
This is a very specific example and short comparison of only two adverts amongst millions, yet it is a perfect example of taking something non-sexual and using sex to sell it, and this is something we are faced with every day.
Take Burger King, for example. I feel that I don’t really need to explain this one, but I have attached a very handy breakdown of their “It’ll Blow Your Mind” advertisement — and yes, I produced it on microsoft paint, get on my level.
Other examples include “Dove” TV commercials where woman splash their faces with liquid, “Herbal Essences” shampoo commercials where a woman is heard to be orgasmicly screaming whilst washing her hair and “Muller” adverts with Nicole Scherzinger somehow managing to get white, creamy yoghurt on her face every time.
Sex is everywhere in advertising. We are sold products on the daily that are perhaps entirely based around how sexually aroused we are at the time of purchase, or by the product and advertisements. It is unavoidable, it is crass, but it works.
Welcome to Western Capitalist Culture, I guess?
You can read more of my work at www.elhudsontyler.wordpress.com
