Half-Naked Women: Advertising Study

My friend and I were discussing why advertisers sometimes use very suggestive ads of beautiful women (and men) to sell their products. Our debate was over the visual vs the content of the advertisement, which I myself was leaning towards the visual aspect that drives traffic and sales, while my friend was leaning towards the content, in regards to scantily clad models on online ads, billboards, television, and more. Maybe it's just me and my male hormones that drive me to look at the picture first with barely taking any interest in what the article says, or not. My friend says he would pay attention to the article title before the picture.

One of the topics we also discussed was the male vs female ratio of people clicking on topics that have beautiful people in it. My friend and I both agreed, to an extent, that both males and females click on articles and advertisements that have a beautiful scantily-clad woman on it, but for different reasons. We agreed that the males click on it because of the physical attractiveness of the woman, while the females may click on it to see just how they make themselves attractive, such as what make-up do they use, are they tanning, are they bleaching their hair, and so forth. Basically, the advertisers are relying on the male primal instinct of mating to drive their sales, while on the same token the females who are viewing the picture are possibly driven by self-improvement.

Due to each page on Hubpages only allowing us to have a single picture as a thumbnail, we're using a beautiful woman (We were going to do both a woman and a man in a single picture, but it's too small). For those that are wondering who she is in the picture, her name is Brooke Burke.

Even though a lot of people would view this as seedy, since this is the "sex sells" type of mentality where your using the human body to sell a product or service. But, for a long time now marketing companies know for 100% fact that this has a strong potential to boost sales by doing next to nothing, just using an attractive person (man or woman, depending on what your selling) to make more money. In a recent article I've written, which discusses the Evolution of Evony Ads, it talks about their older normal looking ads in comparison with their more recent sexual appealing ads where they blatantly display beautiful women. They have been at it for a while now, it must be doing something beneficial for them.

I'm already sure it's going to be the picture, but none-the-less my friend wanted to know what other people thought. Perhaps he's just more text oriented than most people and that is why he said he would notice the article title before the picture, or perhaps I'm just delusional.