Dirty
Diesel: SFW XXX from Latte Martini on Vimeo.
September 29, 2008
November 28, 2006
Porn within advertising, advertising within porn [part four]
In the second post of this series we discussed Shaïwear’s Summer 2006 interactive catalogue in the context of Richard Lanham’s human biogrammar, which offers a practical way of helping us prioritize attention-grabbing elements based on human nature. Not surprisingly, sex is somewhere at the top.
Shaïwear’s catalogue combines X-rated movies with a clever clickable video technology, which adds an extra layer of interactivity to the equation, providing not only an engagement component but also a functional one, which displays the virtual catalogue (with all the details necessary to purchase) within the movie. The experiment works and in our view, does not alter the flow of the experience.
In this occasion we would like to review a different kind of interactivity made famous by Crispin Porter + Bogusky and their now-ubiquitous-in-every-new-media-conversation Subservient Chicken. This type of interactivity seems to be powered by a Darwinian desire of demonstrating strength through domination. Whether we like it or not, most of us get certain level of pleasure when our orders swiftly turn into action.
The Economist declared that “Darwinism is back with a vengeance” in a special report on modern man and evolution published in December 2005. The series of articles taught us that “of the three great secular faiths born in the 19th century – Darwinism, Marxism, and Freudianism – the second died swiftly and painfully and the third is slipping peacefully away. But Darwinism goes from strength to strength…” permeating all areas of knowledge, including communications.
This lesson has been digested (perhaps not so literally) and put into practice again by another French fashion firm. Tooluxe is a boutique chain with six stores in France offering “les plus grandes marques du prêt-à-porter, pour le plus grand plaisir des fashion victims en mal de bons plans.” The brand recently launched a Virtual Tooluxe Shop that allows its users to give orders to Matt and Angie (two sexy clerks). The requests can go as far as the imagination goes as long as they are written in perfect French.
We suggest you type rouge to start.
November 09, 2006
Porn within advertising, advertising within porn [part three]
Terry Richardson has been defined as the “magazine world's Marquis de Sade,” and his work has been labeled as “notably raw, direct, and amateurish, though he is not an amateur.” In his own website he is described as “one of the most prolific and compelling photographers of his generation. Known for his uncanny ability to cut to the raw essence of whomever appears before his lens.” This is precisely what he accomplishes with his latest campaign for Lee Jeans in Australia.
Lee Jeans, The Terry Richardson Campaign, brings to the table advertising that is not quite like advertising. With a stronger focus on the photographer and what he represents, this campaign conveys a level of honesty that is extremely healthy these days when advertising per se is not on its brightest moment.
Lee is opening the door for people to come in and participate on the grounds that everybody knows that it’s advertising. So why not just be open, make it about the process of creating these pictures as much as about the pictures themselves, bluntly stating that in this case the brand is almost donating the space so art and fashion substitute plain advertising storytelling. At the opposite end is Calvin Klein’s underwear campaign (widely criticized mostly for the wrong reasons), which features models posing naturally, pretending that they are just there, that it is not an ad.
Chuck Porter (from Crispin Porter + Bogusky) shared some interesting insights at the AAAA’s Account Planning conference in Miami that we believe are relevant in the context of evaluating this campaign:
Popular culture wants to change. Anything that aids this process will be welcomed.
Beware of metaphors. If you have something interesting to say, say it.
They know it's advertising. So let them in on the joke.
Get really, really close to the audience. He used the example of a few pseudo porn films that they produced for Virgin Atlantic a few years ago targeting frequent travelers (London-New York) whom stayed in luxury hotels and tended to browse through porn with certain frequency…
Which lead us to: Turn off the political correctness filter.
Raw, honest, bizarre, shocking, amusing, not ordinary. These are values that can amplify the performance of almost any brand targeting modern, young-spirited people in the year 2006. This campaign is certainly delivering those values on behalf of Lee Jeans and we wish them all the best just for trying.
October 23, 2006
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.
October 12, 2006
Porn within advertising, advertising within porn [part one]
Browsing through the MIT Advertising Lab blog I bumped into a short note that referenced a Forbes article titled “Mad. Ave Goes (Soft) Porn,” this is of course an old subject, however, the authors reflect on the new status of porn and its relationship with upscale brands, which is not a new trend but a new combination.
Marshall McLuhan said that “All Advertisements Advertise Advertising,” which is the perfect description of the industry’s self-indulgence (slowly changing to accommodate the business of clients in the middle of the equation, but that’s another conversation), which is probably the genetic link between the two camps (advertising and porn). Thrilling, smart ads used to bring more business to agencies regardless of whether they actually did anything to the client’s bottom line; in the same arena, porn sells itself every time it gets produced.
Unlike other mainstream forms of communication, porn lacks the distraction of product integration, focus groups, overpaid celebrities (with exceptions), and multiple other factors that generate a combination of win-lose scenarios that only create noise. So at the end porn sells itself in the same way as the good old ad industry of the past (not extinct yet).
The Forbes article mentions the Jenna Jameson Adidas podcast and shows a small picture, here is the actual video so you can enjoy such a clever piece of advertising that is probably the quintessential example of the new cross-industry link.
October 06, 2006
Sexmiotics
John Cameron Mitchell’s recently released “cinematic exercise” Shortbus is somehow a new breed within a family of films that, as Mitchell himself stated, try to understand whether “ultra-explicit sex can be used in a non-pornographic way (i.e., not focused on getting you off).” Mitchell certainly delivers in a fresh, unique way that differs from other films in the family that, as he recognizes in an essay about the film, deviate to an aggressive, violent, dark corner once the element of sex (ultra-explicit) is brought to the screen. Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible comes to mind.
To understand whether there is indeed a new wave of sex films, we must ask ourselves: what turns a sex scene into an ultra-explicit one? The answer flows rather easily: an erect penis. In our macho society, the longer the erect male organ remains on screen, the more violent or pornographic the film. That seems to be part of a collective common sense.
The erect penises in Shortbus tell us a different story. They are used as visual cues that help us understand key characters in the film and perhaps even the director himself. The penises of this "cinematic experiment" are signs of humanness, non-violent, powerless, normal beings. This probably sets this movie in a new category of sexual expression that liberate reproductive organs from moral feelings.
And speaking of moral feeling, that reminds me of an essay by Roland Barthes titled The Romans in Films, in which he discusses “sweat” as a sign of, you guessed, moral feeling. Barthes explains: “Everyone is sweating because everyone is debating something within himself; we are here supposed to be in the locus of a horribly tormented virtue, that is, in the very locus of tragedy, and it is sweat which has the function of conveying this.”
Go see Shortbus, far from a pretentious art house film it is an entertaining, refreshing experience.
