When is sexy too much?

American Apparel’s salacious advertising is provocative — and it works.

By Laura Collins

American Apparel’s shock value advertising is getting people talking — and displaying young women in controversial poses is a marketing strategy the company plans on keeping.

According to Washington Square News, American Apparel’s marketing campaign is based on a series of sexually exploitative ads that are seen as amateur pornography.

American Apparel photographs women in a way the company views as honest. These sexually provocative ads have often been compared to companies like Victoria’s Secret, who also display their models wearing very little.

Aaron Anderson, sales representative territory manager for Lighthouse Brewery, said that American Apparel features porn-stars in their ads with harsh lighting, submissive posses and suggestive facial expressions.

“Victoria’s Secret takes a higher class stance,” he said. The company focuses on making their models look sexy, but “in a more socially acceptable version.” Victoria’s Secret features models who look powerful and strong, rather than scared and passive.

Lighthouse Brewery also took a risk with their advertising. They produced a handful of provocative internet ads to make a statement and get noticed. The reaction was very similar to that of the American Apparel ads. Some people were disgusted and voiced their opinions, and a lot of talk went around if people had seen the brewery’s ads on YouTube.

“What it accomplished was getting Lighthouse on people’s tongues, getting people talking about Lighthouse and bringing it back to the forefront, regardless of whether people agreed with the advertising or not,” said Anderson. “At the end of the day, our sales are up.”

American Apparel is open about sexuality, and the company’s ad strategy is about tailoring different advertisements for different demographics. Now Magazine in Toronto says these shots are fairly nondescript, except for the fact that the company uses real women, not models, and barely legal porn can be detected in most of the shots. Anderson said American Apparel is doing this on purpose.

The problem behind this strategy, said Anderson, is that they are actually creating a niche market. Those that are attracted to the ads are rebellious youth. “Once you go a direction, you have to stick with it,” said Anderson. “It wouldn’t make sense for them to all of a sudden change their format … because you’re confusing the message. You have to pick the personalities for your product and then roll with it.”

Roughly 70 per cent of these ads are targeted towards women. The reasoning behind this, said Anderson, is that women audiences see these ads and have a sense of vanity to fill, and purchase the clothing so that they can be just as sexy as the advertised women.

Now reported that some audiences said the low-grade photographs degrade women and undermine the labour-rights message American Apparel promotes. Others defended the campaign, saying that in “stitching multiple identities into one shirt – naughty, political and brand-free – American Apparel could be positioning itself to be the iconic outfitter of the decade.”

Controversy is free publicity. If a company buys one ad for $4,000, then that ad gets talked about on blogs, social media and in print — all for the cost of one ad. Without the controversy American Apparel ads create, the company would have to pay six times as much in advertising to reach the same number of people. From that perspective, Anderson said, it is good business.

“They are taking a direction that constantly produces controversy. They are willing to break boundaries and push the buttons of the advertising world,” said Anderson.

American Apparel’s CEO, Dov Charney, told Now that people who say the ads are derogatory to women are behind the times. “They’re old-thinking conservatives who are repeating false arguments or arguments that may have been true 30 years ago based on a context of social, cultural and political dynamics of another era. But right now, the women in the photographs and young adult women today I think celebrate the aesthetic of our advertising.”

The specific ads that reveal more skin than clothes are just “branding American Apparel itself and not focusing on any one specific product,” said Anderson.

This makes it difficult to decipher what American Apparel’s ads say about the company. “It is hard to read corporate culture for any company based on its advertising. They pay advertisers top dollar to give them the image regardless of what the corporate culture is,” said Anderson.

“This is a product for young girls to try and look sexy.”