The Intangible Asset Of Sex

Why human truths are your greatest advertising weapon

“You can’t sell a secret” is an axiom in business.

This one phrase spawned an entire industry called “marketing” that has upended the world for good and ill. Today, a company’s marketing strategy can be the difference between failure and success. You can have the best product in the world, but if it doesn’t sell then what’s it’s a wasted investment.

What do you want to make famous? Ads are the only way to achieve this.

The power of advertising is that if a business gets the ad right, by attaching it to a “human truth,” it really doesn’t matter what the product is. People will buy it regardless. In fact, advertising done right means the product is irrelevant. Let me explain why a “human truth” should be your new best friend.

A good ad sells much more than the product. When you see an ad for a new car with a beautiful woman, you’ve already been sold on something which has nothing to do with the car. You’ve just said a beautiful woman was driving the vehicle. Therefore, the concept being sold by the ad was not the car, but was instead: “this is what a beautiful woman looks like.”

Do you see? If you thought she was beautiful, then the product is irrelevant. You will desire to buy it because there’s just something about that beautiful woman...

That’s why advertising is a strange kind of intangible asset, but it is an intangible asset. More precisely, it is the hidden mathematics of business. It’s true that an advertising campaign can’t be listed on a company’s asset register, but its brand can be. And the formula behind a brand is created by the marketing team.

Let’s dig into this fascinating world of advertising.

Who knows about ads anymore?

Despite the importance of advertising in achieving business success, the topic is poorly understood even by people who have been in the corporate world for decades.

For example, why is a beautiful woman driving that car so effective? Is it because “sex sells”? Sure, that’s the shorthand.

But on a more basic level, it’s a human truth that people are wired to desire sex, or at least wired to appear to the opposite sex as someone who is desirable. In fact, it’s a fun little challenge to think of an action you could take during the day that ISN’T predicated on your innate desire for sex. Go ahead, try it.

If you’re being honest, you’ll struggle to find even one perfectly neutral activity. As famous psychologists have pointed out, everything we do is either travelling towards sex or is a result of having sex recently – which means we are once more travelling towards more sex.

Sex sells, so it makes sense that sex would appear in pretty much every piece of advertising. Even the most sterile job listing has the implicit promise of sex somewhere in its many layers (after all, why else would you be looking for a “better” job? To impress your dog?). Yet many people misunderstand how "sex sells" in advertising.

You can't just put the word SEX on a poster or put some phallic-shaped object in a random image and expect the audience to view the associated product within a sexual context. You could print the word SEX in large, clear type on a billboard and it still wouldn't work to invoke sex.

Advertising uses sex on a symbolic level to connect a product to an unattainable sex object, like that woman in the car ad. The woman is beautiful, but you can never get her. She is driving the car, which then becomes a desirable object simply because the desirable female sex object is sitting in the front seat. But in contrast to her, the car is attainable, for the low-low price of $190,000.

In this way, the object of desire that your sex drive (no pun intended) aims to conjure shifts from the woman to the car which becomes a sex object in her place. Simultaneously, within the image of the ad, the woman's gaze is fixed on the car, so it is represented as an object of desire for her, giving you, the consumer, a sense that because she desires it, your possession of it will attract her to you. Yup, the brain is a funny place.

And don’t try to claim you’re immune. I'm convinced that the forces of marketing and advertising are so effective and have been so thoroughly perfected, that it is almost impossible for anyone to resist. For any person, there is some product out there that these advertising tricks will work on. For you, it's sneakers. For someone else is T-shirts. For a third person, it’s those car ads.

Of course, there is no reason to sell a car by showing a beautiful woman driving it, that set-up makes no logical sense. It tells you nothing about the car or why it is better than other cars. It only works because you, the viewer, have a sex drive. Because sex sells, the product is irrelevant.

Siri, what is ‘lack’?

However, this effect doesn't last.

You don't look at that car ad and then forever think that if you buy that car you also get sex with the beautiful girl. At best, the ad leaves the lingering sense deep in your mind that this car feels/looks/is sexier than the other cars. That impression is what sticks.

Furthermore, you start to see some types of women as “beautiful” when they match the imagery of that woman chosen in the car ad. Yes, there are actual, real people out there who choose a specific kind of model to appear in their ads. Nothing is left to chance because of how much money goes into creating ads. This means any model appearing in an ad is someone else’s perception of “beautiful.” You might think you know what “beautiful” is, but it is frustratingly difficult to know where your organic desires start and the personal desires of some mid-level executive at a Madison Avenue ad company stop.

But as mentioned above, humans operate in two existences: you are either having sex right now or moving towards having sex in the future. There is no permanent middle ground. The only permanent feeling in a person’s life is something called “lack,” which is coloured by the illusory promise of “satisfaction.”

So, the entire point of an ad is to create a feeling of “lack.” Said differently, a good ad conjures an artificial distance between you and your future satisfaction. It then convinces you that if you buy this product – whatever it is – then you will no longer feel “lack.” It’s very effective.

However, the unspoken reality of advertising is that everyone in Madison Avenue knows that satisfaction is impossible because desire is inexhaustible, which is another human truth.

We can always be encouraged to feel more “lack” and then be presented with another object that comes with a tantalising promise of bridging that gap so that we can enter the utopia of satisfaction. The trick in advertising is that the definition of utopia is both a perfect world and a place that cannot exist. Utopia is a mirage, always receding into the distance, never quite attainable. Even if you do buy the car and “get the girl,” there will always be another “lack” waiting for you on the next billboard.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the sweet spot of advertising.

All that matters is that the car sells. To a company, nothing matters except profits. Whether the advertising campaign to achieve this is sexist or offensive does not concern the company as long as that perception does not negatively affect sales. It’s a simple mathematics. If sales are negatively affected, then the sexism in the ad would be bad. But if sales are positive, then sexism is good.

It's all a matter of perception. This perception will translate into sales because another great human truth is that people hate to be excluded. People will eat the most disgusting food – and pay a premium for the privilege – provided they think it is exclusive. They will even convince themselves that the “food” takes good because it is expensive and exclusive.

The influence of advertising

Notice in the above example I never mentioned the make or model of the car. That was deliberate. Once again, it doesn’t matter what the product is. If the advertising works, then the product will sell because the whole point of consumerism is not that a person buys a product. It's that they buy into the product's narrative as constructed by its advertising.

A woman who buys that car to judge for herself if it really is “made for men” is not really judging anything, because the notion that a car is more or less masculine is nonsensical. She isn't countering the “sexist” ad campaign. She's using the car to prove to herself and others that she is the kind of person who stands up to sexism.

The product is the means to an end that exists only in her head and the heads of others that share her cultural framing. The product is a fetish object, imbued with special powers to help us interrelate to others who are programmed the same as we are.

Few people are willing to confront the system of advertising because they like how it works for them in other areas. So, it's easy to mock a message that says, "This car is masculine," but to mock the systems that produce this message means also rejecting the message that "Using a Mac makes me seem more creative" or "These narrow glasses make me cool and trendy."

These are all equally nonsense positions. The products are simply the object on which we project our own fantasies. The car ad isn't about men or women. It's a media fiction that people accept even though they have no basis for it in reality. And I must remind the reader that the fantasies we have – your desire to be cool or intellectual or whatever – were quite likely created by the advertising itself.

It's just a car. Do you like how it drives? If yes, then buy. If not, then don't. When you apply any more thought to the purchasing decision than that, you lose. Ads are full of illusions designed to convince you that the act of buying is something other than giving a company your money, which is a physical manifestation of your time. Money literally represents the time that you worked in the past, or if on credit, the time you will have to work in the future to pay the debt.

After all, the art of business is convincing other people to take the money that’s in their pocket and put it in your pocket. Now can you see why good advertising can be a company’s greatest intangible asset?