Nov. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Are you shocked by companies using slogans that rely on sexual innuendo to sell their products? Or disturbed by pictures of semi-clad models being used to promote ranges of clothing?

Like many of us, you probably just find the constant barrage of sexual imagery in advertising is starting to wash over you. Sex, it appears, doesn't sell like it used to.

After a decade during which marketing became raunchier and raunchier, the tide has now turned. There are signs that glamorous blond women and muscle-rippling playboys are no longer the answer to every marketing officer's prayers.

In the U.K., HeadlightVision Ltd., a unit of WPP Group Plc, which is the world's second-largest advertising company, this year produced a study showing the saturation of sexual imagery in advertising had become a turn-off for young consumers. Based on research in 14 cities around the world, including New York and London, it concluded that young urban consumers were tired of sexual explicitness in advertising.

And last year, Britain's Chartered Institute of Marketing found in a survey of 1,000 people aged 15 and older that only 6 percent enjoyed or were influenced by sexual images in ads.

U.K. retailer French Connection Group Plc announced during the European summer that it was dropping its ``FCUK'' logo (it stands for French Connection United Kingdom) from its next ad campaign. In the past, the company had used the logo to sell perfumes and T-shirts, such as one released for the Democratic National Convention in Boston this year.

Abercrombie & Fitch

A sudden outbreak of modesty? Not exactly. French Connection's profit and sales growth slowed in the fiscal first half ended July 31, about two weeks before the decision to drop the logo. The explicitness just wasn't working anymore.

And U.S. retailer Abercrombie & Fitch Co. last December decided to stop publishing a quarterly catalog that sparked complaints over photos of scantily clad models. Why so coy? It may have been worried by the protests. Yet it was probably more worried by the 13 percent sales decline at stores open a year, which it reported for the month before that decision was taken.

Like French Connection, sexual imagery wasn't selling.

What's happening? There are no hard and fast rules in business. Yet like the famous quote that nobody ever went broke by underestimating the taste of the U.S. (or any other) public, it is surely true that nobody ever went broke by making their marketing too sexy. When in doubt, drape a blond woman across the front of a car, or put a picture of a brunette with a pistol on the poster, and watch the stuff walk out of the warehouse.

`Surrounded by Sexual Imagery'

So have consumers just lost their collective libido?

Matthew Hirst, the London-based editor of the Headlight publication D_Code, who wrote that company's report, says it is the quantity of sexual advertising that is the problem. ``What we are saying is that explicit imagery doesn't have the same impact anymore,'' he said in a telephone interview.

``We are dealing with a generation that has grown used to being surrounded by sexual imagery.''

And that is the nub of the story.

In the 1960s, all manner of sexual taboos were loosened. Not only did people become more liberated in their own sexual attitudes, but books, films, music and television all started to deal with sexual themes far more explicitly.

Inevitably, that seeped into marketing.

People are more interested in sex than just about anything else. Companies like to capture people's attention. No surprise then that they regularly used sex to help sell things.

In the past decade, two other trends helped bolster that.

Feminist Backlash

In the 1970s and 1980s, the loosening of taboos was counteracted by feminism and political correctness, which frowned on the use of women's bodies to sell products. That served as a sort of brake. Yet in the last decade, that brand of feminism seemed to fade, releasing advertisers from their shackles.

Next, the intensification of competition and the explosion of different forms of media have meant there are far more marketing messages screaming for our attention. It has become hard for advertisers to get through to us. The result? They have resorted to ever more extreme language and images.

So, for the last 10 years, all the taboos have gone. Companies and advertisers felt unrestrained in using as much sex as they wanted to in their marketing campaigns.

Yet, they forgot one of the first rules of economics: the law of diminishing returns. The more you do something, the less you get out of it.

A New Approach

Sexual imagery is now so ubiquitous in marketing campaigns it has lost the power to shock us. It is no longer even engaging our interest. A naked body is about as effective as slapping the words ``New and Improved'' on the front of the product. It won't make anyone pick up the box, let alone buy it.

Instead, companies will have to find another way to promote their goods.

Maybe they could try just telling what it is, what it does, and how much it costs. Now, that really would be shocking.

To contact the writer of this column:
Matthew Lynn in London at  matthewlynn@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this column:
Bill Ahearn at  bahearn@bloomberg.net.

Read a book, get oral sex: Ads in NY buses

Reuters New York, November 6

New York officials were red-faced on Friday after they discovered that clothing ads on city buses that appeared to promote reading suggested a love of books could be rewarded with oral sex. The advertisements that ran on about 200 buses across the city in recent months carried posters displaying a suggestively posed woman in hot pants kneeling among a pile of books beside the snappy slogan "Read Books, Get Brain." What unhip, unsuspecting local transportation officials did not know was that "get brain" is street slang for oral sex. The ads from hip-hop clothing maker Akademiks, which intended the double-entendre  was stripped off New York buses on Friday after transportation officials discovered the street slang meaning. An ad from hip-hop clothing maker Akademiks. The clothing ads on New York buses that appeared to promote reading suggested a love of books could be rewarded with oral sex. Metropolitan Transit Authority spokesman Tom Kelly condemned the "vulgar street phrases" in the racy ads he said were "demeaning women." "To me and I believe to everyone else, while it was done by a clothing line, it would give the impression that it was also promoting reading and literacy," Kelly said. "It's easy enough to understand how that would get by based upon someone not knowing the expression." A spokesman for the New York-based clothing maker noted the ad campaign had run since September and "we hadn't had any complaints at all." New York officials may not be the only ones caught out. Akademiks also placed the ads on buses and bus shelters in Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, San Francisco and Philadelphia, the company spokesman said. Kelly, who said he was his 60s, said that after he was tipped to the hidden meaning of the phrase on Thursday he ran a test among some young MTA workers. "I went downstairs to the mailroom and showed some of the young guys a copy of the ad," he said. "I was watching their faces and they all start smirking. "Apparently it's on all the music, in music that's how they refer to it," Kelly said. "I didn't know anything about it and I'm sure the people that approved the ad didn't." Kelly said it was sad that "you can't take things at face value any longer," adding, "We'll have to learn from experience before we accept ads." The ads followed another recent advertising controversy at the MTA. A poster commissioned to mark the 100th anniversary of the subway was found to contain numerous plugs placed by its designer for the Church of Scientology.