'Great Sex: God's Way'. Two phrases I'd never have imagined together in a sentence, or an incomplete one at that. Lo and behold, these billboards are out there (waaaay out there, in Alabama to be specific) causing quite a stir with the local folk. Four words, and a community goes up in arms.
No, not s-e-x on a billboard!!! Not those letters!!
In New York City, we exposed to such a barrage of visual stimuli in every direction. A billboard like that would most likely go unnoticed around here.. TVs atop taxi cabs and on digital roadside billboards are not only hazardously distracting to drivers, but they actually can attest to how much flashing and brightness is necessary to get our attention anymore. In our subways, the shameless ads promoting beverages, lawyers, podiatrists, storage companies, and ironically enough parking garages, are all I can pretend to focus on to not make eye contact with my fellow commuters. Even as a captive audience, those ads speak little to me, except when someone draws a mustache or blacks out the teeth- then I can appreciate the humor that went into defacing it. On Queens Blvd. there is an billboard for a mattress company that features a couple, whom one is to assume are naked from the bare shoulders down, lying chest-to-chest on a mattress looking "satisfied' in a post-coital embrace with the slogan, "Satisfaction guaranteed." A not-so-subtle hint of sexual undertones. Or the more blatant Swatch Bunnysutra billboard in Times Square - a mere poster so graphic that was able to garner attention in this the brightest spot in America, with enough flicker, glitz, and electronic madness to make anyone turn epileptic. More photos were taken of that billboard than of the Naked Cowboy, whom, I might add, I hardly even bat an eye at anymore.
Because I am over-stimulated by my environment from the minute I leave my apartment and hop on a bus sponsored by the various organizations who think groggy commuters give a shit what they are selling, to the moment I return, I have viewed, without a doubt, at LEAST 100 advertisements. Between the bus, subway platforms, subway cars, street bills, sandwich board dudes, flyer distributors, and I'm sure various other sources, I have reached maximum intake threshold. Even those 50-foot tall yummy Abercrombie guys above the L.I.E. who are inexplicably close while being next-to-naked (ironic, since they're a clothing company and the ad features none) were met with a momentary "hmm."
"Sex sells," the adage goes. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it sells, so much as it catches our eye for just a moment longer, being that we already have so much else thrown at us. The ad companies are certainly aware that they have to one-up each other to get anything noticed anymore.
I open the floor to you, dear readers, and let the games begin: Noticed any good ones lately?