Deccan Chronicle And The Naked Art of Selling News

08Jun08

In the age where our most inner and intimate matters have been commoditized by corporations, it’s no surprise that sex is being used as a tool to sell products. Many critics of popular culture use the adage “sex sells” to justify the means. Well, though there may be some truth in it, it’s disgusting if a product that comes with an element of the proverbial “social responsibility” resorts to a juvenile representation of its target market for the sake the one thing all business needs – sell more.

If the advertising guys at Deccan Chronicle think this is what young minds are – one heck of perverts ogling at hoardings of naked woman embossed in newspaper prints all over her body, metaphorically meaning to read the newspaper giving particular attention to detail, or whatever crap that was meant to mean – then there has just been a little mistake. Just that we youngsters have a little more sense than to get swayed by pictures of naked women to buy a newspaper.

What’s more intimidating is that their ad doesn’t even talk about the quality of news – the least you would expect of a newspaper – and whenever they remotely do, it’s again a skin-deep expose. Chennai Metblogs carried a post on similar lines with more pictures. Probably the in-house talent pool of Deccan Chronicle Marketing ran out of concrete ideas to increase youngsters’ readership and resorted to the only supposedly sure-to-work strategy – sex appeal.

An independent survey conducted by research firm MediaAnalyzer states that,

While almost half of men (48 percent) said they like sexual ads, few women did (8 percent). Most men (63 percent) said sexual ads have a high stopping power for them; fewer women thought so (28 percent).

If only 8 percent of women give a damn to such an ad, then was it all about increasing Male leadership? Am I hallucinating or does it really sound awkward? If you still think this would make Deccan Chronicle the-ultimate-choice-of-the-young-minds then take a bite at this MediaAnalyzer finding,

Men tend to focus on an ad’s sexual imagery (breasts, legs, skin, etc.), which draws their attention away from other elements of the ad (logo, product shot, headline). This may be why men’s brand recall was worse for the sexual ads than for the nonsexual ones.

So there goes the sex sells theory. Trying to fit an ad suited enough to market a lingerie brand into marketing a newspaper looks as awful as it sounds. They would do a lot of good to themselves, if the nice folks at Deccan Chronicle could stuff their ad-women with some clothes and talk more about how good their news reporting is, so we know exactly what they sell. We youngsters like to see naked truth in newspapers, not naked women.

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