Does Sex Still Sell? Calvin Klein’s Racy Ad Has the Answer

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Sex sells was once a golden rule of marketing. But does it still apply? If there’s a brand who knows how to use sex appeal in its advertising, it’s Calvin Klein, whose new ad with Hollywood star Dakota Johnson is the latest in their series of iconic (and sizzling hot) underwear commercials.

Stars have been stripping down to their Calvins for decades – from Mark Wahlberg and Kate Moss in the 90s to Johnson and The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White in the 2020s. You’d think the ads would have lost their power to shock, but the brand still knows how to push boundaries and raise temperatures. Dakota Johnson’s ad takes a meta turn, with the actress reclining on a sofa responding to a script, which might well be for the ad itself, before playing pool in just a thong. Clever camera angles – and two halves of grapefruit – keep things just inside the nudity line but there’s no attempt by the brand to hide the message. Bodies look good, and bodies wearing Calvins? They look even better.

The fact is that overtly sexual ads are usually divisive for audiences. They might seem too crude or gratuitous, and different viewers will respond very differently to seeing a nearly-naked woman (or man) on screen. Does that mean they’re a bad idea? Not at all, you need to be careful analysing Test Your Ad test results. Purely emotional response – our Star Rating – isn’t always the most relevant measure of performance.

The two most important measures to look at for Calvin Klein’s ad are Spike Rating and the level of Neutrality the ad generates. Spike Rating is our predictor of short-term performance, which for an average ad hovers around 1.0. The more it spikes above that baseline, the more powerful the potential for the ad to deliver a major sales boost. On rare occasions Spike can rise as high as 1.7 or 1.8 (the kind of ratings you get for candy ads at Christmas, for instance) but for fashion ads it’s a modest 1.04 average.

Calvin Klein’s ad handily beats that, at 1.3 Spike Rating, putting it in the top 10% of all fashion commercials. In other words the ad’s ideally positioned to spark an underwear sales surge.

The other big indicator of how this ad works is that only 18% of viewers feel Neutral about it, compared to the US average of 35%. Positive and negative response is higher than usual for an ad, meaning the slice of people who just shrug and feel nothing is squeezed.

And for Calvin Klein, that’s a great result. As our Cost Of Dull research shows, high neutrality – high dullness, to be brutally honest – is a major opportunity cost for brands. It takes far more investment to get the same business impact from a dull ad than an interesting one. Calvin Klein’s racy ad is in the lowest quartile of dullness – love it or hate it, 82% of people have some reaction to it. That makes it more likely to be talked about (and it certainly has been) and more likely to drive business returns. Sex may be shocking or seductive, but it’s not dull – and that, more than anything, is why sex still sells for Calvin Klein.