Who put the bed in bedroom? Part 1
Those of us who deal with apartment affordability tend after a while to forget their principal demographic appeal, until we are reminded of it by astonished dowdy-ism of the Gray Lady herself, the New York Times, who has discovered to her white-glove shock that there is sex, sex being used to sell urban living space:
A WOMAN with tousled hair straddles a grinning, shirtless man on a bed alongside the words: “Try This at Home.” This was not an advertisement for beer, perfume or instructional Kama Sutra DVD’s. It was an advertisement for the Herald Towers condominiums in Midtown Manhattan.
Paging the Gray Lady!
In a print advertisement for the Link condominiums, also in Midtown, a red-lipped topless woman (only a sliver of one breast was visible) is shown sitting in an apartment while a tattoo is applied to her exposed back.
Thank you, New York Times, for clarifying that the toplessness was virtual, ‘only a sliver of one breast.’
An ad for the Link condos on
The Times then makes the obligatory pun:
Some of the advertisements for new condominiums this year look more like ads for condoms, and that has caused more than a few eyes to linger on traditionally staid real estate listings. These provocative advertisements have also raised eyebrows among real estate and advertising professionals who say sex has never been germane to real estate marketing the way it is, say, to music and underwear.
At this point, your humble correspondent risked falling from his office chair guffawing.
Sex has never been germane to real estate marketing?
Titillating advertisements are a nearly fail-safe way to capture consumer attention in a slower, more competitive market.
As opposed to those go-go markets where they fail completely.
Sex never works for me.
But their existence also raises the question of how to sell real estate — whether salacious advertising is a smart strategy that can win buyers or a lazy tactic that lacks creativity and alienates viewers.
Why can’t it be both — a lazy tactic that wins buyers?
Selling real estate these days means selling a lifestyle, according to industry professionals. People are “looking for a narrative in terms of how they’re going to live,” said Jasmine Mir, the senior vice president of the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group. The aim, she said, is to match buyers’ “lifestyle expectations by showing them imagery that will allow them to imagine an exciting and appealing lifestyle living in the building.”
“I think the advertising is, at its heart, emotional,” she added. “I think people need to be reached in an emotionally compelling way more and more in this market.”
The definition of market value isn’t the average price, it’s the highest probable price, and if we offend 99% of the people but persuade 1% to buy, that is the definition of successful advertising.
All we need is one.
Of course, sexy advertisements are hardly startling these days, especially with the proliferation of Internet pornography, but when women are pictured alone and in various states of undress in real estate advertisements (as opposed to beer advertisements), it raises larger issues.
As opposed to portraying them in habit and wimple, I suppose.
You had a chance with one of them.
Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive and chief creative officer of the Kaplan Thaler Group, an advertising agency, said marketing a property with well-endowed women was a throwback to the days when men were the only income earners.
Then what is marketing a property with well-endowed men?
Bare skin and some not-so-subtle insinuations are becoming the hallmarks of advertising for new condominiums, and for the companies that sell and market them.
“It’s very limiting,” she said. “I don’t think it’s necessarily the best way to sell anything anymore.”
As Sam Craig, professor of advertising and marketing management at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at
Professor Sam Craig; he’s probably alienated
It’s not how many you alienate, it’s how many you stimulate, as the actress might have said to the bishop. Why on earth do most people get their own apartment? Not for the pleasure of sleeping alone.
Apartments, particularly urban high-rises with their phallic mine’s-taller-than-yours competitiveness, have always been associated with assignations, such as the whole plot premise of The Apartment (1960):
Insurance statistician C.C. “Bud” Baxter advances his career by making his
Jack Lemmon as CC Baxter, Shirley Maclaine as Fran Kubelik
Since the high-rise was invented, in fact, its principal lure has been as the bachelor pad, a concept so mouth-wateringly seductive to young men that it features as the perfect place to hang your Maxim cheesecake poster:
Bachelor pads were where Esquire-reading men mixed highballs:
and put “Louie Louie” on their hi-fi stereos:
… all in pursuit of the mysterious female.
Tell me a Bedtime Story.
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]
