Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday October 25, 2012
The tram stop poster caught my eye, with cockroaches running up a nude body. I stopped and focused the morning blur out of my eyes. No, they were black demons with claws digging into the arm pits of a masked woman - presumably Lady Gaga because that's the name on the bottle.
I stared in disbelief. Black perfume? Creepy monsters? What the... At which point I had to remind myself that I was not the market. Far from it. Probably teen and twenty fashion-conscious girls would get a thrill from this repelling sado-erotica. Their parents wouldn't like it, which is a good measure for why it could succeed.
I then remembered how many past perfume campaigns have relied on shocking the elders and giving women a feeling of being naughty just by applying a dab on their skin.
When Guerlain's Shalimar was launched in 1925 it was called scandalous because of its strong fragrance, its vanilla base note regarded as a powerful aphrodisiac. It was said nice girls don't wear Shalimar. So of course they did.
Your grandmother would have been titillated by Dana's Tabu advertisements using an aroused violinist passionately kissing his piano accompanist. That has a highbrow ancestry - according to the story by Leo Tolstoy, the couple were playing Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata when overcome by lust. The affair ends when the husband kills the wife. How's that for a passionate perfume?
By the 60s women had a new set of scandals for their perfumes. The women's magazines - the overseas ones anyway - seemed filled with perfumed nudes. Arpege, Corday, Cashmere Bouquet - and of course Guerlain.
Pretty soon nudity became standard fare, so the fragrance folk searched elsewhere, and found drugs. Opium was launched by Yves Saint Laurent in 1977, causing scandal about the name in America. Then a billboard featuring Roald Dahl's sumptuous granddaughter Sophie Dahl lying naked on her back was banned by the British Advertising Standards Authority. World-wide rage and bans! So of course it was a huge success.
With Madonna, always shocking with her cattle prod. Her new perfume is Truth or Dare, and already America's ABC network have asked for the split-second shots to be retouched and "her bra digitally made bigger, and her corset longer to cover more of her bottom." As if! If I were her agency I'd be leaping with delight.
These days you're no-one if you ain't got your own smell. Rihanna has launched her perfume called - Nude. No prizes for guessing the ads. Beyonce also scored a British ad ban for her Heat commercial in 2010 as she writhed and sang "Fever".
Calvin Klein won't be out-banned by anyone. His Secret Obsessions commercials with slithering Eva Mendes got banned everywhere - and then went on to live a very happy success on YouTube.
Just this month Brad Pitt became the first ever male spokesperson for Chanel No 5. His commercial is a baffling, vacant monologue that everyone loves to hate. But so far it has generated four million YouTube hits and space on every talk show on the planet, so you'd have to rate it a success. Kinda.
Meanwhile Lady Gaga's Fame continues to push the boundaries with a satanic, oily commercial featuring lots of flesh and demons. Ah yes, perfume advertising has evolved, but not really changed.
ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com
