Porn within advertising, advertising within porn [part two]
In the context of the attention economy, human attention is regarded as the ultimate currency. The theory says that in a world overwhelmed by information, the mere act of paying attention involves a value exchange. The viewer (or reader, listener, etc.), in this case has in her hands a limited amount of this currency and whoever wants it must play by the rules dictated by the framework of the new economy.
Some of the basic conventions that drive the economy of attention dictate that there has to be a value exchange in the communication process, which means that people must be compensated to watch, listen, read, via some sort of value added to the message. In addition, it is now more important than ever to master the elements of communication that maximize attention grabbing, such as design, style, storytelling, as well as the elements of human nature that direct awareness.
Richard Lanham in his book The Economics of Attention refers to those elements of human nature using a term borrowed from behavioral biology: the human biogrammar. According to Lanham this term “represents the stored-up impulse to pay attention to certain kinds of things in certain kinds of ways.” Sex and sexual stimuli occupy a privileged space in the human biogrammar, which not only justify its prominent representation in the world of communications (from art to advertising), but also is a key motivation for the intensification of sexual images as the amount of information available grow exponentially in a way that the world has never experienced.
Radical increase of information sources = scanter attention as currency = stronger sexual content in communications. Especially in advertising.
In the previous post on this subject we provided the Jenna Jameson’s adicolor example. In that case sexuality was magnified through the use of an icon. Adidas didn’t have any need to show hard-core sex, as Jenna is hard-core sex herself, she signifies the modern porn industry and the mere association is enough.
In this second post we would like to offer a more explicit type of example: Shaïwear’s Summer 2006 interactive catalogue, which combines a clever clickable video technology (soon to be ubiquitous in most video-based catalogues as well as in webisodes from major US Network TV stations) with X-rated movies.
It is evident that the next step in sexual representation is at an early stage. In this example it is extremely easy to deviate the attention (far) away from the product, however, the effort shouldn’t be dismissed as a failure. A forum on the site demonstrates that there is a healthy exchange of commentary by consumers and that the brand is certainly associated with a particular statement. What is important is to keep an open mind and avoid falling in the trap of judging these efforts by the old rules of the game, for now our role might be as simple as just watch and enjoy.
