Study: Sex in Ads Improves Men’s Purchase Intent.

Sex in print advertisements improves the ad effectiveness for men, including ad-like, product-like, and purchase intent, while it decreases ad effectiveness for women. For both men and women, sexual ads make it less likely that they will recall correctly which brand an ad was promoting.

The online test combined a questionnaire and a visual test using the new and unique AttentionTracking method (web-based eye tracking). It thus featured the first ever large-scale visual test of what people look at when they see ads with sexual themes. This allowed the study to provide some insight into why sexual ads work the way they do.

Some of the conclusions: Sexual ads have a strong, polarizing effect on the visual behavior of men and women. Men spend a high amount of attention on the sexual imagery (e.g., female breasts, legs, and exposed skin). While this does increase ad liking and product liking, and transfers to purchase intent, it draws men’s attention from other elements such as the brand logo –one of the reasons why their brand recall is worse than women’s. Women, on the other hand, avoided looking at sexual imagery or even exposed skin.

“You can increase purchase intent using sex when advertising to men. But you pay a price; brand recall suffers. That means using sex in ads only makes sense for companies with a well-established brand, or those where branding plays no role,” said Karsten Weide, President and CEO, MediaAnalyzer Inc.

The study also found that sexual ads polarize the sexes in general: While men like ads with sexual themes and do not think they have negative effects on society, women feel the opposite way. Most women believe there is too much sex in advertising (58%), and more than 40% of all women feel that sexual ads signify and promote a general deterioration of moral and social values, and pose a threat to the proper upbringing of children, respectively.

The study tested ten current US print-ads, five of them included sexual imagery and five did not, with 400 US respondents split evenly between men and women.

For more information at http://www.mediaanalyzer.com