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Another sign of the times is that the suggestive plots in many ads have shifted. Men are now accorded equal status with women as sexual objects, and females are frequently portrayed as the aggressors in romantic encounters. In one television commercial for Foster Grant, for instance, a woman on a plane flirts with a man who is wearing the company's sunglasses, tries them on, then tucks them into her briefcase. When he asks, "What about my sunglasses?," she hands him a business card and purrs, "I'll be staying at the Savoy."
A few of the suggestive new ads have achieved a cult following. Hennessy Cognac's portrayals of a gorgeous woman in a tiny purple bathing suit flirting with an equally attractive man at poolside first appeared last February in SPORTS ILLUSTRATED's annual swimsuit issue; readers wrote in to say that the brandy-toting beauty (Julie Floyd) was the best-looking model in the magazine. Shortly afterward, says Moet-Hennessy Vice President Clinton Rodenberg, New York commuters started stealing the ads from trains.
According to Rodenberg, the series, which began in 1983 with a picture of a young couple snuggling by a ski-lodge fireplace, was designed to attract new yuppie customers by showing people "enjoying Cognac in other than the traditional smoking-jacket environment." The strategy seems to have worked. While liquor sales in general have been falling, Hennessy's increased 13% in 1984, and 10% more in the first half of this year.
Advertisers are acutely sensitive to public reaction. Says Doyle Dane Bernbach's Grace: "If an ad campaign gets enough negative reaction, it will stop. Advertisers walk in great dread of offending potential consumers." The creators of erotic ads think that they are in step with current American sensibilities. But some people, including a few on Madison Avenue, fear that they may be going too far. Says Hal Seaman, head of the New York City- based Advertising Educational Foundation: "There's a borderline between good taste and bad taste, between romanticism and quasi-pornography, and I don't think advertising ought to cross that line."