What is sexy ?: correlates from a study of recent magazine advertisements

Sexual appeals in advertisements are quite common. Sexually appealing ads contain some form of nudity or suggestive content, and as such they have the potential to offend large numbers of individuals. Despite this fact, advertisers apparently believe that sex appeals are a very effective way to communicate with consumers and ultimately generate sales. The limited research that has been done on this issue is equivocal. The results of studies may be mixed in part due to definitional problems as to what, exactly, is a sexy ad. Past studies have involved intuitive definitions of sex, but in fact, researchers do not know what makes an ad sexy (Courtney & Whipple, 1983). Therefore, the present study examined several elements of advertisements in order to determine which of them related to perceived ad sexiness. These elements included suggestive wording, model attractiveness, model pose, sexual imagery, nudity, model clothing, and overall liking of the ad. It was found that the attractiveness of the models in the ad, model clothing, and model body language were the most strongly related to perceived ad sexiness. Also, sexiness was strongly related to ad liking, which indicates that as ads become sexier, they also tend to be better liked. Nudity, surprisingly, was not strongly correlated with ad sexiness.

Factor analyses were conducted to discover if these ad elements formed one or more underlying factors that could be used in future research. The analyses showed that there are two factors underlying the eight items. The first factor was generally composed of ad liking, perceived ad sexiness, model attractiveness, and model clothing. The remaining four variables loaded onto Factor 2. The two factors were highly correlated.

Analyses of variance were conducted on each of the variables mentioned above to examine the effects of the sex of the participant and the type of model (male model, female model, or couple) on ad response. Results showed a tendency for opposite sex effects in which women rated ads with male models higher on these variables (e.g., ad liking, ad sexiness) than men did. Likewise, men rated ads with female models higher on four of the eight variables than women did. Ads depicting couples, however, were rated highly by both men and women.