Warning that the final joke might not work outside Australia...
We all know that sex sells, but do we appreciate the different ways that it does? I hear people lamenting the appalling, crass or blatant use of sex and sexuality to sell things here in the West, and all I can do is shake my head. Yes it is used, but don't talk trash about the method! We have it good.
It takes genuinely shallow sex-advertising to wake one up to the reality of how far we have come. And genuinely shallow is something Russia has in spades. So many aspects of Russia's contemporary culture hark back not to communism, but to a bad 1990's American Dream. You hear it on the radio, you see it in the 'fashion', but more strikingly than anything it is the advertising which slaps you in the face. It is impossible to drive the streets of Moscow without being distracted by billboard-sized breasts advertising toothbrushes and automotive paint. The TV ad with the three naked nymphs playing in a field?: tissues - though admittedly there could actually be a causal link in that one.
The complex viewer-sex-product relationships which I hear attacked as blatant are anything but - the presence of sex might be unmistakeable, but its uses are increasingly ingenius, adapting to increasing desensitisation and viewer fatigue.
I look forward to the ads of ten years' time, the new ways in which the gurus will latch on to my predictable - and natural - desire to fuck.
And Russia, in ten years' time?
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