Sexy pink

I've blogged about sex being used in advertising before, but I think it has now officially hit a new nadir.

Two fish fingers meet a third fish finger who has a sultry feminine voice and then unzips her breadcrumbs to show her 'pink' underneath, at which point the other two fish fingers faint.

It left me thinking 'Whaaaaat?'

Someone somewhere decided the way to sell new salmon fish fingers for Bird's Eye was to turn a salmon fishfinger into a femme fatale flasher-of-the-pink.

I admit it's clever in a 'how many absinthes did you neck before you came up with that left-field idea?' kind of way. But, they're fish fingers. And sick jokes about 'fishy fingers' aside, no one wants to connect fish fingers with sex or sex with fish fingers and we shouldn't be made to connect them because some addled creative put them together in an advert for TV.

To prove I'm not making it up, you can watch it here.

Does sex sell?

Adverts I’ve seen in the past 24 hours which have used sex to sell…

Tesco.com
“So what do you have planned for later?” asks Martine McCutcheon, plumbing the depths of corporate soul-selling, and visiting a random bloke in a flat to advertise Tesco. “Nothing,” says the bloke, as two guys from Tesco.com struggle to get a mattress up the stairs.

Red Bull
Two cans of red bull are investigated by a pigeon as various items of clothing rain down around him, accompanied by giggles. Just how would you have sex in mid-air anyway?

Christina Aguilera perfume
“Sometimes it’s all you need to wear,” breathes Christina. Put some clothes on love, you’ll catch your death.

Diet Coke
Three girls jam themselves in the lift so they can be rescued by the hunky maintenance man. Now, if that was me and chicks kept jamming the lift for fun, I’d leave them there.

That godawful advert for Organics shampoo
The best bit about this is the cockatoo telling the aroused woman showering on the beach to ‘keep it down, love’. Cockatoos are cute. But a woman coming in the shower because she’s rubbing glorified soap on her hair raises all kind of Freudian questions.

Random mobile phone company
(see I don’t even know who this is for)
The tagline runs “Don’t let work steal the best bits of your day” as a bloke keeps leaving the office at lunchtime and is just about to kiss his beloved when he finds himself back at his desk. It’s a nicely worked advert, but then you see the bits he’s ‘missing’, including his post-coital, doe-eyed lover lying in bed, the two of them making out in the sea etc. etc. etc.

Overdone

Cadbury's Caramel - one of the nicest chocolate bars around, even if we do miss the sultry bunny rabbit who used to tell the woodland folk to 'Take it Easy'. People said the Flake adverts were sexy, but compared to Caramel...

Cadbury's Caramel Eggs, however, are far too caramelly. And, frankly, are not very nice.