Calvin Meets the Marlboro Man

By Janice Castro

What is the most familiar U.S. advertisement? For years the answer was the Marlboro Man, an American icon who helped make the Philip Morris cigarette the nation's best-selling brand. No longer. According to the latest report from Video Storyboard Tests, a New York City firm that rates the ten most noticed print ads, Marlboro has been edged out by Calvin Klein, the designer whose suggestive series of underwear ads first appeared in 1982. Says Dave Vadehra, president of Video Storyboard Tests: "Calvin Klein has managed to do in three years what it took Marlboro 20 years to do."

Klein, whose firm produces its own ads, is America's undisputed pacesetter in turning out erotic ads and commercials. One of his earliest efforts was a famous--possibly even notorious--1980 jeans ad featuring Brooke Shields and directed by Klein. "Nothing comes between me and my Calvins," cooed the teen beauty, then all of 15. In one of Klein's latest ads, an impressionistic one for the perfume Obsession, three men and a woman, discernibly nude, are intimately entangled. In an even more suggestive television commercial, a pubescent boy appears to be lusting after a woman twice his age. Thinking about her, he moans, "Oh, the smell of it."

Erotic advertising is popping up everywhere, promoting everything from after-shave lotions to exercise machines. The eye-catching and pulse- quickening ads are breaking many of the unwritten rules that once governed the industry. While there is nothing new about using sex as a sales allure, many of the current ads reveal considerably more skin and make a far racier pitch than ever before. One ad, for example, shows a man clad in little but shaving cream, his eyes closed, one arm tightly embracing a scantily clad woman as she wields the razor. The object being promoted: Swatch watches, a trendy Swiss brand. Sure enough, on second look, each is wearing two of them. The broken taboo: seduction in the bathroom.

Ads for Soloflex, an Oregon maker of body-building equipment, show a woman's hand touching such brawny hunks as Boxing Champ Ken Norton, Muscleman Frank Zane and Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Mitch Gaylord. The headline: "A hard man is good to find." Says Jerry Wilson, founder of Soloflex, whose sales have jumped 20% since the ads started appearing last spring: "There's no way I can sell the product without selling sex."

Advertisers argue that the main reason ads are sexier these days can easily be determined by twirling a television dial, dropping by a local movie theater or checking the sales of X-rated video cassettes. Explains Roy Grace, vice chairman of the Doyle Dane Bernbach Group: "As a society, we're becoming more accepting of overt sexuality." In an era that has seen steamy prime-time soaps like Dallas and Dynasty become popular hits, and that nonchalantly accepts frank discussions of incest and bisexuality on Phil Donahue's show, erotic ads merely reflect the tone of the times. Says John Ferrell, creative director of the Young & Rubicam agency: "Advertising doesn't lead society, it follows."

Another sign of the times is that the suggestive plots in many ads have shifted. Men are now accorded equal status with women as sexual objects, and females are frequently portrayed as the aggressors in romantic encounters. In one television commercial for Foster Grant, for instance, a woman on a plane flirts with a man who is wearing the company's sunglasses, tries them on, then tucks them into her briefcase. When he asks, "What about my sunglasses?," she hands him a business card and purrs, "I'll be staying at the Savoy."

A few of the suggestive new ads have achieved a cult following. Hennessy Cognac's portrayals of a gorgeous woman in a tiny purple bathing suit flirting with an equally attractive man at poolside first appeared last February in SPORTS ILLUSTRATED's annual swimsuit issue; readers wrote in to say that the brandy-toting beauty (Julie Floyd) was the best-looking model in the magazine. Shortly afterward, says Moet-Hennessy Vice President Clinton Rodenberg, New York commuters started stealing the ads from trains.

According to Rodenberg, the series, which began in 1983 with a picture of a young couple snuggling by a ski-lodge fireplace, was designed to attract new yuppie customers by showing people "enjoying Cognac in other than the traditional smoking-jacket environment." The strategy seems to have worked. While liquor sales in general have been falling, Hennessy's increased 13% in 1984, and 10% more in the first half of this year.

Advertisers are acutely sensitive to public reaction. Says Doyle Dane Bernbach's Grace: "If an ad campaign gets enough negative reaction, it will stop. Advertisers walk in great dread of offending potential consumers." The creators of erotic ads think that they are in step with current American sensibilities. But some people, including a few on Madison Avenue, fear that they may be going too far. Says Hal Seaman, head of the New York City- based Advertising Educational Foundation: "There's a borderline between good taste and bad taste, between romanticism and quasi-pornography, and I don't think advertising ought to cross that line."

With reporting by Cristina Garcia/San Francisco and Barry Kalb/ New York