Sex Sells

It’s no secret that sex sells, we’ve been doing it for decades! The basic formula is simple, stick an attractive person, preferably a female celebrity, on the front of a magazine and the item flies off the shelf tens of times faster than one where Gordon Brown’s ugly mug is staring back at you. The formula can be applied to all manner of products and services and in today’s fast-paced world it can delivered across multiple platforms too.

As a man of unspecified age who has carved a career in the marketing services industry very few things surprise me…or so I thought until I watched Lady Gaga’s million-pound music video, (cough) 9-minute commercial, for her new song Telephone. It wasn’t the scantily clad females or broadly homoerotic theme, the sloppy lesbian prison kiss or even the scene in which Beyoncé and Lady Gaga appear to commit mass murder together but the gratuitous product endorsement that struck me.

I noticed four major brands including Virgin, HP, Coke and Polaroid and four further less obvious ones including a dating website, headphones and two US food brands. While some might wax on about the artistry of the video or how very clever Ms Germanotta, AKA Gaga, must be for harnessing the power of brands to create the most talked about music video of all time I just can’t get rid of the slightly metallic taste that it has left in my mouth. It makes Duran Duran’s Girls On Film seem sweet and the decadence of the eighties appear ever so slightly twee. So, while Gaga’s video might be one of the coolest I’ve seen in a long while, for me at least it was the point at which the whole notion of using sex and product placement in a piece of creative had gone a little too far into the realms of irresponsibility.

Slightly numbed by the wholly Gaga experience it came as much less of a surprise to me that the Liberal Democrats had selected a female pornographic film-maker as their parliamentary candidate for Gravesham in Kent. Perhaps Anna Arrowsmith, who has been selling sex for the last decade, can apply her winning formula to the Lib Dems election campaign and aid their flagging performance in the Gravesham vicinity. Afterall, if it’s good enough for Coke, Polaroid and Hewlett Packard…

All this talk of sex has made me beg the question “what is the world coming to”. Maybe, against all my youthful protestations to the contrary, I am finally turning into my father but perhaps that’s no bad thing.