You are now entering Ad Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …
The Product:
Carl’s Jr. / Hardee’s restaurants
The Promotions (NOT SAFE FOR WORK):
The Pitch:
Here at Carl’s Jr., we – *fap* *fap* *fap* *fap* *fap* *fap* – our sandwiches are top of the – *FAP!* *FAP!* *FAP!* *FAP!* *FAP!* *FAP!* *FAP!* Guys! We’re trying to do a commercial here!
Wow, Carl’s Jr. got super horny there for a while, huh?
We’ve talked about “sex sells” advertising before. How GoDaddy used in-your-face sexuality to shock viewers into paying attention. How Axe Body Spray used spontaneous acts of raunchiness to market their product as an aphrodisiac. How Xerox used a sultry secretary to associate their machines with a workplace fantasy. And how Love’s Baby Soft …
You know what? Let’s not delve into the minds behind Love’s Baby Soft.
These Carl’s Jr. ads (which are but a sampling of many similar ads they released between 2005 and 2017) have a bit of that GoDaddy just-trying-to-get-attention vibe to them. But there’s something else going on here, too.
Carl’s Jr. may have taken it further than most, but there’s always been an association between food and sex. Perhaps because they’re the two most common and most potent “pleasures of the flesh”: physical experiences that send waves of pleasure chemicals flowing through our brains without needing to go through the intellect first. Perhaps because eating and procreating are two of the most basic desires evolution has selected for. And perhaps because … well, you’ve got a wet, open orifice with this pink bundle nerves that sometimes sticks out, craving something to be put inside it and stimulate it to … yeah.
Media is littered with examples of this connection, from classy images of strawberries being seductively placed between eager lips, to the loaded-with-cultural-baggage phrase “sinfully delicious”, to that episode of Seinfeld where Jerry admonishes George, “I’ll tell you what you did, Caligula. You’ve combined food and sex into one disgusting, uncontrollable urge.”
So a restaurant taking their ad campaign in this direction … it makes a certain amount of sense.
Still, there came a point where Carl’s Jr. realized they’d perhaps gone a bit too far. Maybe the controversy their ads provoked came to outweigh the benefits. Or maybe they realized that, since the ads focused exclusively on sexy women eating sandwiches, roughly half their audience was going to be, at best, unmoved by the titillation on display, and at worst, actively repulsed by it.
Thus it was that the food porn ads were put out to pasture, and Carl’s Jr. turned to the one man who bail them out: Carl Hardee Sr.