I’m going to try and keep this post SFW. But since it’s all about sex, I’m not sure how successful I’ll be.
I don’t need to lecture you all on the importance of proper branding. It can take a bad product, like a cheap cologne, and make it popular. It can take a good product, like a music player, and make it into an icon.
I’m sorry to say that right now, sex is an amazing product that needs a marketing makeover.
I’m not talking about marketing that uses sex. There’s plenty of that, and it’s just peachy. What I’m talking about is considering sex itself as a product. If you wanted that product to fail, could you think of any worse names for the two major sex positions?
In 1965, the Hearst newspapers in San Francisco refused to print movie advertisements containing the words “cuties, flesh-a-scope, girlie, homosexual, immorality, lesbian, lust, naked, nothing on, nudies, nudist camp, nymphs, pervert, professional girls, prostitute, rape, scanty panties, seduce, skin-a-scope, sex, [...] sex rituals, sexpot, sexsational, strippers, and third sex.” (This is quoted from an essay by the film historian Eric Schaefer, which you can find in this book right here. The list of terms was originally published in Variety.)
Okay: really, Hearst newspapers? I mean, really? You’re going to go with “flesh-a-scope” on this one? REALLY? Has that ever been used to advertise a movie? But actually, the main thing that this list of banned words tells us is that EVERY ONE OF THEM has been used to advertise a movie at some point. Still, putting “flesh-a-scope” into google image search yields zero results, and a regular google search just leads back to another quote from Variety. (FYI: A google image search for “scanty panties” yields 116 hits, and while some of these are pretty much what you’d expect, you also get…
Belinkie, Wrather, and Fenzel analyze presidential and gubernatorial sex scandals throughout American history, touching on Eliot Spitzer and “Kristen” (Ashley Alexandra Dupré), Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Hugh Grant and a cut rate Sunset Blvd. hooker, and Grover Cleveland.
Excuse the bad Skype connection and light production values. This is Episode 4 of our podcast, and as our podcasting kung fu becomes mightier, we have been trying to use musical bumpers, get good sound quality, and so forth. But we wanted to get this up while it was still relevant.
Download Episode 4 (AAC Format)
