The Bum's Rush in Advertising

Some turn-on commercials appear to be turn-offs

Smiling coyly at the camera as she hunkers down on the floor and spreads her denim-clad legs wider than a 21-in. television screen, the teen-age temptress murmurs huskily, "You know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing." Then Photographer Richard Avedon's lens zooms in to linger on Actress-Model Brooke Shields' taut jeans.

That is how Calvin Klein jeans are being hawked in a TV commercial called The Feminist. It is one of a series of six Klein ads that, besides selling a lot of $50 pants, are bringing a message to the media: vulgarity in advertising is on the rise, and bottoms are big business. Responding to an avalanche of viewer complaints, NBC in New York City last week banned The Feminist, which is the most suggestive in the series. Earlier CBS and ABC affiliates in Los Angeles and New England rejected some of the other commercials as well. The stations have agreed to air a few of the less objectionable spots after 9 p.m., or in some cases after midnight.

Klein's former ad agency, Scali, McCabe, Sieves, resigned the jeans-maker's account a few months ago, when Calvin Klein insisted on directing the commercials himself. Even so, President Ed McCabe reports that his shop "has had more letters begging us to take the ads off the air than I've ever experienced in this business." Says Evelyn Dee, a staff member of Morality in Media, a New York antipornography group: "We have got tons of letters. A lot of people think Brooke Shields is being exploited."

Klein professes amazement over the stir. Says the designer, who plans to shoot another series of Shields ads soon: "I never thought that people would be offended. I'm shocked that there has been such controversy." But it is no secret on Seventh Avenue that Marketing Whiz Warren Hirsh resigned as president of Puritan Fashions, which peddles the Klein jeans under license, after a battle with Klein about the propriety of the Shields ads. When Klein started advertising his Puritan jeans only this summer, Hirsh had already made Gloria Vanderbilt denims famous for another company under such slogans as OUR BOTTOMS ARE TOPS.

There is nothing new about using sex to sell goods. Years ago, ads were featuring well-endowed young women sprawled across the hoods of sportscars or urging Chesterfield smokers to "Blow some my way." What is new is the prurience of the pitch. Says Adman Wayne Stevens of J. Walter Thompson, one of the nation's largest ad agencies: "There's a tremendous market out there and a tremendous effort to be noticed, to be different. It seems that companies, rather than playing 'me too,' are trying look at me.' And sexuality is one of the ways they're going with the 'look at me.' "

Sex is being used to promote items as varied as cologne and traveler's checks. In one TV ad, East Coast Chicken Peddler Frank Perdue declares that "my breasts aren't moving as fast as my legs." Paco Rabanne is trying to boost sales of its men's fragrances with a TV spot that opens on a naked man lying on rumpled bedsheets. When he answers the phone, a woman's voice breathes seductively, "You snore." He responds coyly, "And you always steal the covers."

Citibank pushes its traveler's checks by showing a couple vacationing in Japan going native in a public bath: the wife cringes in embarrassment as a real native not only edges closer to make conversation but threatens to stand up to welcome the outlanders. The California Avocado Commission promotes the nutritional value of its green "love food" with the help of aging Sex Symbol Angie Dickinson, 49, who in December will sprawl across two pages of recipes in some 18 national magazines. The copy asks: "Would this body lie to you?" Ads for B.V.D.s, now made by Union Underwear Co. in Bowling Green, Ky., are heavy on beefcake: one has a cowboy happily shaving out on the range clad only in skivvies.

Evidently, sex sells. Puritan Fashions reports that sales of Klein jeans have risen so far this year to $110 million, up from $65 million in 1979. The company predicts that its fancy denims will bring in $200 million next year. But some admen fear that too much suggestive promotion may boomerang on the products being sold.

Hirsh believes that sexy ads may distract consumers: they "don't hear how good the product is," he says. J. Walter Thompson's U.S. chairman Burt Manning has another concern. His worry: "Numbers of viewers are going to conclude that 'only a flaky segment of society would respond to that kind of advertising. I don't want to be like those people, so I'm not going to wear that kind of brand.' " The products will be noticed, he says, but the ads will be turning consumers off, not on.

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