Food Materiality & Erotic Advertising
This is a mini-exhibition exploring eroticism in food advertising this topic:
While researching food marketing materiality, I noticed that many of the newer food ads depict sexual messages or subtle innuendo.Why these undertones of sex-is-related-to-food themes? Visitors should notice that there is a undertone of sexuality in most advertisements in this exhibition. A food ad, by its very nature, is meant to excite a reaction of desire within the body. Deriving our investigation from Schlereth's Material Culture, we take a closer look in these short discussions of the materiality involved in making food porn, "it makes no sense to appreciate an work without attending to its medium and to think about content without attending to the medium that both communicates that content and represents or helps to set the limits of what that content can consist of" (Schlereth 8).What else could sex possibly have to do with food? Besides the obvious correlations between food porn and actual pornography, the samples below provide an interesting glimpse into consumer nature, sensation, material marketing, consumption, and advertising.
Kaufmann with Another Look at The Food Network:
Sex Sells, Again and Again:
What does this ad suggest about our bodies and media? How about our reflexes and senses?
A phallic piece of bread. Image Source: Indiana.edu/~slavicgf/
Our primal desires are easily manipulated by media. Advertisements are material symbols hoping to influence and draw out "outward signs and symbols of particular ideas in mind" ( Schlereth 3). There is no body shown, but that does NOT suggests that bodies are not involved Whether overtly sexual or not, these ads are characterized by sexuality, sexual orientation, and sexual distinction.
His and Hers Altoids magazine ads.
Advertising is a medium that takes on all forms. Design is fundamentally the art of using lines, forms, tones, colors and textures to arouse an emotional reaction in the beholder. (Ewen 50)
Advertising is a medium that takes on all forms. Design is fundamentally the art of using lines, forms, tones, colors and textures to arouse an emotional reaction in the beholder. (Ewen 50)
Erotic Images, Materiality & the Senses:
Collection of Sexy Commercials.
Advertising is a billion-dollar industry built to 'satisfy' our material needs. A content provider and creator, advertising agencies have employed 'sex appeal' because it is the lifeline of heterosexual reproduction--hardwired into our biology. They piggyback our sexual responses to serve us more products. They are appealing to and enhancing desire by painting in the consumer's mind pleasurable aspects or possession of the commodity. They try to speak to the primal urges and sensations that are repressed in the everyday confines of society. (Ewen 49) We form cyborg translations of the reproductions of material world and objects into desires, actions, thoughts, senses/feelings, and emotions (Nakamura 319). Food and advertising becomes an experience and thereby definition a dematerialized medium (Brown 51). A de-materialization via digital encoding of the material world (Brown 51).
Thin Sex Appeal
"Social ideal of thinness is a by-product of modernity..
Conforming to ideals that have informed developments in architecture, design, advertising imagery, and fashion, the ideal body is one that no longer materially exists, one that has been reduced to an abstract representation of a person: a line, a contour, an attitude, skinned from its biological imperatives. Regardless of the shape one's body takes, whatever flesh remains is too much; image must be freed from the liabilities of substance" (Ewen 183).
The Female Mold
What does the treatment of women in these ads say about sexuality? Linda Gordon, leading historian on the rise of birth control: "in the work on sexuality the quintessential debate among women's historians reemerges in slightly different forms: are women molded or have they been able to create their own identities? The answer, it is now clear, will be--both" (Gordon 193). Further study is required to determine the depth of cause and effect these ads have on gender roles.
Pure, maybe, suggestive, yes. Image Source: indiana.edu/~slavicgf/
TIMELINE of Food, Sex, Advertising, & Materiality Events:
- 1794: Lithography was invented, making real posters possible for advertising.
- 1843: Volney Palmer opens the first advertising agency in Philadelphia.
- 1893: Asa Briggs Chandler registers Coca-Cola as a trademark.
- 1899: Campbell Soup Co. makes its first advertising buy.
- 1906 W.K. Kellogg places his first ads for Corn Flakes in six midwestern newspapers. By 1915, he is spending $1 million on national advertising.
- 1911: Woodbury Soap breaks its "The skin you love to touch" campaign in the Ladies' Home Journal, marking the first time sex appeal is used in advertising.
- 1919: Japanese candy company Glico introduces its building-spanning billboard, the Glico Man
- 1920s: Previously elite magazines became aimed at a mass market.
- 1960: The mechanized Kani Doraku (a crab/seafood restaurant) billboard is built in Dotonbori, Osaka
- 1997: Tobacco advertising is no longer allowed on outdoor billboards in America
- 2010: The first "scented billboard," emitting odors similar to charcoal and black pepper to suggest a steak grilling, was erected in Mooresville, North Carolina by the Bloom grocery chain to promote the sale of beef.
Timeline Sources:
Ad Age "Advertising History Timeline: A 295-year synopsis of the most important events in American Advertising, 1704 to 1999" http://adage.com/century/timeline/index.html
"Billboards." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 20 Nov. 2010. Web. 29 Nov. 2010.
"History of Advertising" By Roli: http://www.xtimeline.com/timeline/History-of-Advertising
