Here's the Steamy Video to Go With Calvin Klein's Sexting Billboards

Building on last week’s digital-dating print campaign, Calvin Klein is taking its #mycalvins play for the Tinder and Grindr generation into the live action realm.

A new spot overlays sexts onto the fashion category’s usual moody writhing — the brand claims the dialogue is based on “actual events and people,” which is easy to believe, given it includes lines like “come ovr”. (Gotta say, that kind of creative license has never gotten a writer off.)

Like the billboards, Mother New York created the spot, featuring international faces like Grace Hartzel, Ethan James Green, Aya Jones, Julia Van Os, Piero Mendez, and more. And while it’s easy to dismiss as merely tortured or sexually provocative, it does deserve credit for its recognition of diversity in many forms: It is hetero, gay, ethnically mixed and sexually open.

But it’s maybe most notable for how it masterfully illustrates the listlessness of a generation ruled by swipes, right or left. Even in sexual intimacy, these people don’t so much connect as graze, and the tyranny of a small text can result in either the happy arrival of a third partner, or a precipitated gathering-of-belongings before wandering off to the next hook-up. This is best exemplified by the conversation that concludes the piece.

“Why do we even do this?” an angsty male voice says into the ether.

“Because it’s fun, and you love it,” replies a woman whose aggressive tone suggests this isn’t actually about loving anything — it’s mainly about diversions.

These 'Cancer Sutra' Posters Show How to Check Your Partner During Sex

Ad agency The Bull-White House’s “Cancer Sutra” campaign was a provocative idea in search of a sponsor—until Stupid Cancer, a nonprofit dedicated to helping young adults with cancer, signed on.

Central to the effort, which coyly suggests you can spot signs of cancer while having sex, is a series of colorful posters, designed by Brooklyn artist John Solimine, showing couples in the act. Sales of the posters will raise money for Stupid Cancer, and Bull-White House hopes to turn some of them into wild postings. There’s also an e-book, website and video.

Agency founder Matthew Bull discovered Solomine on Behance.net and was drawn in particular to “Strongman Love,” an illustration of a man with his arm wrapped around a woman that Solimine made about four years ago. That visual style defined the new campaign. (There are lots more images here.)

As Bull explained, “Curvaceousness, hard angles, a playful approach to negative space—all of these were critical in differentiating the Cancer Sutra from any other Kama Sutra we’d seen before.”

Adweek responsive video player used on /video.

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AdFreak asked Solimine about the making of the posters.

When did you first get the call for this?
It was late last year when I got a call from Bull-White House. It was funny because upfront, from the call, I had no idea what the project was.

What was the initial brief?
They started off with the statistic that a huge amount of people who find out they have cancer actually discover it before, during or after sex. … When you tell people about it and use that as an intro, people are like, “Wait a second.” Just the words cancer and sex in the same sentence—probably you’ve never heard that before, you know?

Why did you want to do this?
The scope of it, the size of it. They said, “We’re going to need between 20 and 40 illustrations” at the beginning of the whole thing. And just the subject matter I thought was great. When it was pitched to me, I was like, “Wow, I’ve never heard that idea before.” So, I found it unique. And I’ve had family members who were stricken with cancer.

What inspired the look and feel of your posters?
An old poster that I had done for Fab, that website fab.com. … They would partner with various artists and have that artist come up with half-dozen or so unique pieces that were just for the Fab sale. And then you could sell anything else you wanted of your previous work on there. But one of the posters I created for my Fab sale (“Strongman Love”)—Bull-White House had seen that on my website and they kind of pulled that out stylistically and said, “We really like what you’re doing with this one.”

What was it about that poster?
I don’t think they wanted it to be anatomically [correct] or lean too much on that. They wanted it to be playful, have interesting body shapes and not go for Ken and Barbie or Penthouse and Playgirl, that kind of thing, and not have it be too porny in any way.

It must have been tricky to straddle that line.
At that first meeting, just to clarify what we were going to be doing, I was like, “So, I’m going to be drawing people actually having sex in various ways, right?” And I think in the beginning everybody though that yeah, you are, and it’s going to get pretty graphic—like there’s really no way around it for what we’re talking about.

But then when we actually started doing the illustrations, working on them and being collaborative, we all realized that there was a way that we were going to be able to pull it off without actually showing anything, which I actually think became the trick of it, like, “OK, how can we show pretty graphic descriptions of sex without actually showing anything at all, really?” I think all you really see graphically are like two or three nipples maybe. So, I think the suggestion of it is the strength of it.

I could see this on T-shirts. Could you?
Oh, yeah, definitely. I think there are a lot of cool applications. They were jokingly talking about turning the pattern into sheets, pajamas or something like that.



Alvin Baltrop and Gordon Matta-Clark: The Piers From Here

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The exhibition focuses on the area of the Piers in New York City during the mid 1970s, and speaks of the state of abandonment and dilapidation these underwent as a consequence of the oil crisis that reconfigured the geography of the city as well as the international market and trading system continue

Shunga: sex and pleasure in Japanese art

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In early modern Japan, 1600-1900, thousands of sexually explicit works of art were produced, known as ‘spring pictures’ (shunga). The exhibition examines the often tender, funny, beautiful and accomplished shunga that were produced by some of the masters of Japanese art continue

Keep Your Timber Limber

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The exhibition explores how artists since the 1940s to the present day have used drawing to address ideas critical and current to their time, ranging from the politics of gender and sexuality, to feminist issues, war and censorship continue

#A.I.L – artists in laboratories, episode 18: Zoe Papadopoulou

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Zoe has spent the past year exploring the scientific and technological developments in Artificial Reproductive Technologies. She particularly looked at questions such as “Will the techniques themselves have the potential to fundamentally change the way we perceive parenthood and reproduction? How will the stories we tell children evolve?” In the show, we will be talking artificial uterus, the orphan child who had 5 parents, artificial gametes, and premature babies exhibited in freak shows continue

Leigh Ledare, an erotic family album

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Ledare is famous for being one of the very few contemporary artists who still manages to shock and break taboos. His most famous series was shot over a period of 8 years and stars Tina Peterson, his own mother. Posing gleefully for him in négligé or in fur hat but more often naked. In sickness and in health. Flirting with the camera (or the man behind it), masturbating, having sex with younger men, etc. One moment she is defiant, powerful and utterly stunning. The next, she’s chubbier and wearing a brace around her neck continue

Strange Hungers

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Sadie Hennessy – Strange Hungers delves into the mysterious workings of desire, and the insistent lusts and yearnings of the sexual appetite.

Hennessy’s prints, collages using vintage housewives magazines, sculptures that adorn mundane object with sexual innuendos are relentlessly campy and witty continue

An ass shaped like a dick / Pas de quoi sex-tasier?

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THE ORIGINAL?
7Hills Foundation / Aids Prevention – 2011
“Use condom before screwing up”
Agency : Unknown (Turkey)
LESS ORIGINAL
Yog Sutra “For A Healthy Sexual Life” – 2012
Source : Adsoftheworld
Agency : Publicis Communications Mumbai (India)

The Extreme Environment Love Hotel: Carboniferous Room

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Japanese love hotels go out of their way to satisfy the most outlandish fetish: some rooms offer the feeling of being inside a subway carriage, a class room, or a Hello Kitty SM room, others locks you into an alien abduction nightmare (/dream).

Ai Hasegawa, second year student in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London, proposes to close loving couples into an even more extraordinary fantasy.
Her Extreme Environment Love Hotel simulates impossible places to go such as an earth of three hundred million years ago, or the surface of Jupiter by manipulating invisible but ever-present environmental factors, for example atmospheric conditions and gravity continue

LA Zombie: The Movie That Would Not Die

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Who would have thought i’d end up blogging about a splatter movie on wmmna? I’m not talking about any horror movie, i’m talking “gay-porn zombie film”, a genre which i assume is under-represented in contemporary art. Written and directed by Bruce LaBruce and starring porn actor François Sagat, LA Zombie is on view at the Peres Projects gallery in Berlin, along with a dozen new works on canvas continue

Exhibition tip – Sex Cinema Venus

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Sex Cinema Venus is the oldest sex cinema in the Red Light District of Amsterdam, which will soon disappear as a result of the city council’s regeneration plans. Using a slide show and several single photographs Van der Burg portrays the stories that take place behind the doors of this particular cinema continue

Advertising is Irrelevant?

noAdsHeeAdWeek and Harris recently released a poll asking those not involved in the advertising trade what they thought of advertising’s “relevancy.”

The results show that most find that our jobs, as a whole, are rather irrelevant.

Advertising’s down, no doubt, and now Adweek’s heaping salt on the wound!

Well, Mr. and Mrs. America, let’s look at a life without advertising. A life of relevance.

TV staticFirst of all, without advertising, we would not have free access to television. Advertisers in essence pay for the shows we watch by running commercials. By the same logic, the web in that state would not be as comprehensive as the one we experience now. Radio would be a paid service with subscribers. Programs and shows with relatively lower ratings would be immediately slashed since they would no longer be able to support themselves.

The cultural art form of advertising would be lost.  The circle of life would be disrupted.  Just as life influences advertising, ads influence culture.

Without advertising, creatives would be cubicle-bound and non-imaginative. Serious. Boring. Sex would not sell, and neither would honesty. No one would fight for the cause. PETA would consist of two guys fighting for animal rights, and no one would care. Animals wouldn’t be cool to wear. Or not wear. Or own.  Times Square would be dimly lit. Your favorite beer would be just “BEER,” as the term ‘generic’ would dominate store shelves. Color would be sparse. Trendsetters would be trend-less. No brands, no logos, no icons or spokespeople. No sexy models, sexy shows, or suggestive commercials. We wouldn’t know who to vote for, or why. Four hour erections? Who’d need the pills, let alone use them? No body-image, no silicone implants, no tummy-tucks. No Jon & Kate. Michael Jackson would just be another singer. No Hollywood trailers, stars, starlets, tramps, red carpets, or blockbuster openings. No E! TV, no TMZ. No Paris, Lindsay, Nicole, or reality TV. No Tila Tequila.

No PSA’s warning that your brain on drugs was scrambled. Or that kids shouldn’t smoke crack and that crack kills. Rather than axing the marketing budget first, corporations would axe employees. And that would be just fine, because there would be no PR effort, no big news story, therefore no downside.

Life would go on, but it would be bland and tasteless. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and MySpace: no need for them.

Take a picture of the Cold War-era Russia and apply it to a life without advertising. Cold. Drizzling. Muddled.

The link to this study is now unavailable.  Was the issue so unimportant that Adweek pulled the article? Or was the study published on the wrong day?

Luckily, I printed it:

In an AdweekMedia/Harris Poll last month, respondents were given a chance to say they don’t feel strongly about the industry one way or another, and nearly half of them took it. Asked to characterize their overall impression of “the advertising industry in general,” 47 percent said it’s “neither negative nor positive.” Predictably, those with a negative view of the business (9 percent “very,” 28 percent “somewhat”) outnumbered those with a positive view (2 percent “very,” 15 percent “somewhat”). (The total exceeds 100 percent due to rounding.)

If such numbers count as not-so-bad news for the ad business, responses were less positive on the question of whether consumers find advertising relevant to their lives (”By relevant,” Harris told respondents, “we mean how it connects to things that are ongoing in your daily life”). Given the effort put into aiming the right ad at the right target, the numbers here were pretty lackluster. Eight percent of respondents said advertising is “very relevant” to their lives, and 42 percent said it’s “somewhat relevant.” Thirty-two percent termed it “not that relevant” and 14 percent “not at all relevant,” with the rest unsure.

Can you say “OUCH!”?

Jeff Louis: Strategic Media Planner, Project Manager, and New Business Account Coordinator. His passion is writing. Reach out and touch him: www.linkedin.com or www.twitter.com.


Sex, Sex, Sex

Fast Food Wars I am loving the porno wars fast food company’s have introduced into our advertising. While only a few have been spotted here in our U.S. of A, international Advertising is running ramped with the integration of food and sex.

I’m not offended — as a woman, a professional, and an advertiser. In fact, I am completely digging this. When times get desperate, living organisms seek whatever means necessary to survive. Just take a look at any of the popular “survival” shows. So, why should advertising be the exception. Hasn’t advertising always been the medium to push the envelope, to blur the line or whatever cliché you want to insert. It has. I say: “Jolly good fun!”

Starting from the Quizno’s Marlboro inspired sandwich all the way to the “put it in me” line from… wait, that’s Quizno’s too! Wow. Nothing like Subway’s major competitor to recommend sex and smoking as they compete against Jared followers. That, of course, is probably all he needed: to get laid and have a smoke (the century-old diet plan). Quizno’s isn’t the only company targeting raging hormones, as Hardee’s are Carls Jr. are also contributing more than their share of sex to advertising.

We’re so desperate to hold on to the growing competition in market share, that soon, we’re just going to show completely nude women sitting with a foot-long Subway sandwich between her legs offering a “quick and cheap” lunch option “any way you want it.”

In case you’ve missed the latest release, Burger King has decided to step up its game in the fast food wars. Since they’ve completely lost the family market to McDonald’s, they just figured they would go the completely opposite route and appeal to the sex starved males. That’s a BIG market, and why not capitalize on it? I think it’s smart of BK to restructure their targeting because they’ve truly been fighting a losing battle for a long time. You can’t beat McDonald’s. You just can’t. Let them have their family. Eventually, these kids are going to grow up and become sex starved teens and young adults, which is exactly whom The King is targeting!

Rena Prizant is a Copywriter, Ad Creative and mammal in the Chicago area, professionally word playing since 2002. Rena writes smart, engaging, dynamic copy for a broad range of mediums and industries; and loves helping start-up’s get their branding feet. Visit www.RenaPrizant.com or Twitter WriteLeft.

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Rena Prizant is a Copywriter, Ad Creative and mammal in the Chicago area, professionally word playing since 2002. Rena writes smart, engaging, dynamic copy for a broad range of mediums and industries; and loves helping start-up’s get their branding feet. Visit www.RenaPrizant.com or Twitter WriteLeft.


Craigslist Steps Up–Kind of…

cl-womanCraigslist is dropping the “erotic services” portion of it’s site due to pressure from impending lawsuits and a murder linked to the site.

Unfortunately, the fix is nothing more than lip service. The category will simply be renamed and Craigslist will charge an additional fee for its use. Additionally, Craigslist employees will monitor posts before they appear online, something for which Craigslist has been criticized since adult advertising on the site started. Police in numerous states have used Craigslist as a tool to set up prostitution ”stings” and the fact that sex is available on Craigslist is well-known. Is Craigslist worried?10501890-2

Probably not. According to Craigslist attorney, Eric Brandfonbrener, appearing in federal court for a hearing on [an Illinois] lawsuit, told U.S. District Judge John Grady that the site would change to satisfy the lawsuit:

“My expectation is that it will be moot,” Brandfonbrener told the judge. [Illinois] attorney Daniel Gallagher said he remained skeptical. “They’ve made promises to attorneys general in the past,” Gallagher said, noting that
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal had brokered an agreement with the site in November to crack down on prostitution ads after being contacted about several complaints about photographs depicting nudity. “I’m not going to take their word for it, we want to see action.”

The best thing to come out of this is that if you are searching for sex, AshleyMadison.com is now available! Ashley Madison is an adult service that encourages adults to have affairs, and their tagline says it all: Life is Short. Have an Affair.™ Unlike Craigslist, however, Ashley Madison guarantees that if you are not knocking boots, or at least hooking up by your 90-day anniversary, they’ll refund you $249.00 (the cost to join?). In April, Ashley Madison began advertising in Chicago, and although many US stations have refused to air their ads, some Chicago stations are running the spots. Ashley Madison’s newest innovation is that members can Have An Affair Anywhere, a mobile phone service that allows members to hook up while traveling.

But, a Guarantee! And to think of all money I wasted on drinks…

Jeff Louis: Strategic Media Planner, Project Manager, and New Business Coordinator. His passion is writing, contributing to BMA as well as freelancing. He’d love to hear from you: linkedin.com/in/jefflouis or twitter.com/jlo0312.

Sex Easy To Find On Craigslist

Craigslist may face criminal action in South Carolina unless the online classifieds service stops running ads the state says promote prostitution and pornography, the state attorney general’s office said Thursday.

picture1Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster probably never guessed that his name would be involved with murder, a sociopath, and angry Americans. After all, he simply ran a classified ad website…what kind of trouble could he get into?

Well, he may spend time in the big house if he is not careful…although it is highly doubtful. However, he has taken his share of legal and  public flogging, so much so that he has responded via the Craigslist blog: 

“When critics rush to tar craigslist as especially dangerous, it’s important to put things in perspective,” he writes. “Craigslist users have posted more than 1.15 billion classified ads to date, easily 1000x the combined total ever posted to the print publications involved in all of these ‘print ad murders.’”

In its “terms of use” section, Craigslist says it is not responsible for ads on its sites. Which is basically the same as the disclaimer that smoking can kill you on the outside of the cigarette box.

craigslistart

Sex on Craigslist is not hard to locate: Just go to the “personals” and look for the link that says “misc. romance and casual encounters.” Now it is true that Craigslist is not the first public “portal” that has been used for people trying to hook up for sexual activity…MySpace, Chat Rooms, AOL…they have all been exploited for sexual purposes. With any service that is used to put two people together that have never met, there is a good chance that the person you meet may not be the person that was portrayed. It’s one of the pitfalls of personal “online” branding: we have the ability to be who we want to be.  

Mr. Buckmaster does have a valid point in that predators have found prey via other methods, and not just Craigslist. However, when newspapers used to run classified advertising, there were no pictures of naked women, no promises of sexual gratification-and if there were, they were veiled as something else entirely.
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It’s really nobody’s fault anymore. Craigslist is just another company that is not responsible for the indirect damage they’ve enabled. The CEOs of banks, automakers, mortgage lenders…it’s not their fault, either. Let the public beware! After all, they were just trying to make a little money. So some people died. Other’s lost their life savings. It’s not our fault.

However, as the world becomes interconnected, some sort of responsibility must be taken by those that provide the means. We assume that others are as ethical (for better or worse) as we are, and it is not too much to ask for a little corporate responsibilty, as well. If someone was hurt on your property although being warned prior to the fact that danger existed, there would still be culpability inolved for having something of danger exposed to the public.  

It’s not that I think Craigslist is guilty; rather, I feel that they should take some of the responsibility. Yet, the fact that Craigslist has entirely blamed everyone but themselves, and has even researched other murders that have happened via classified ads seems a bit caustic and a little too casual. Luckily, the killer was caught quickly…maybe at the beginning of a serial killing spree. What would Craigslist have done if there were ten murders?  
 

Jeff Louis: Strategic Media Planner, Project Manager, and New Business Coordinator. His passion is writing, contributing to BMA as well as freelancing. He’d love to hear from you: linkedin.com/in/jefflouis or twitter.com/jlo0312.

Los Penetrados, Santiago Sierras political porn photography

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Couples are geometrically arranged into compositions of up to 110 bodies with two colours. The Acts feature the various possible combinations of penetrator / penetrated: white man-white woman, white man-white man, white man-black woman, white man-black man, black man-black woman, black man-black man, black man-white woman, black man-white man continue

Nathalie Djurberg solo show at the Fondazione Prada

There are very very few artists whose work i admire as much as Nathalie Djurberg’s. Actually there’s only one and she’s a woman too. Her name is Gabríela Fridriksdóttir. These artists create universes which are dark and mysterious. But there stops my desire to compare one with the other.

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Nathalie Djurberg, We are not two, we are one, 2008

I don’t know what happened to Djurberg since the first time i saw her work, at the 2006 Berlin Biennale but her twisted tales have grown crueler and more menacing .

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Nathalie Djurberg, Once removed on my mother’s side, 2008

The protagonists of Djurberg’s stop-motion animations are hand-modeled plasticine puppets. If this reminds you of some cute tv programme you followed as a kid then let me crush any nostalgia you might have. Djurberg clearly didn’t see the same children animations as you and i. Her animations show human beings at their most crass, psychopath, sadistic and often disarming behaviour. The macabre atmosphere of her animations almost never come with words, just a languid and fidgety music composed by Hans Berg.

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Nathalie Djurberg, Caveman Mike, 2008

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Nathalie Djurberg, Caveman Mike, 2008

It often starts well. In one video, a mother plays in the bedroom with her kids. In a second video, three beautiful girls get naked to take a bath in the pond. A third film shows a pretty eskimo girl walking on thick ice. After a few seconds, the children start disappearing inside their mummy’s vagina turning her voluptuous, elastic and Fellini-esque body into a monster creature with multiple arms and legs, the girls chase and burn the young lad who was peeping at their nudity and the eskimo does what any eskimo is supposed to do: she harpoons a walrus, remove its bowels. Only that she won’t eat it. She sews herself inside the animal’s skin and quietly leaves for a crawl on the icefield.

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Nathalie Djurberg, It’s the mother, 2008

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Nathalie Djurberg, It’s the mother, 2008

The videos address a fair amount of intense issues such as violence, sexuality, sadism, cruelty, death and brutality. Made all the more upsetting by the fact that the artist messes with our moral codes and would never point to us where is the right and where is the wrong. She takes us on a roller-coaster and all we can to is try and keep track of our landmarks.

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Nathalie Djurberg, Turn into me, 2008

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Nathalie Djurberg, Turn into me, 2008

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Nathalie Djurberg, Johnnny, 2008

The artists filled the exhibiting space of Fondazione Prada with models that work as counterparts to her videos, there’s a huge sprouting potato, the plump bum of a woman, a little house . These models become pavilions inside which the videos are projected.

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The Potato (detail). Photo Attilio Maranzano

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Das Waldhaeuschen, 2008. Photo Attilio Maranzano

You have until June 1 to check out the show. Previously at the Fondazione Prada in Milan: Tom Sachs.

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Portrait of Nathalie Djurberg. Photo by Hans Berg

All images courtesy of the artist and Fondazione Prada, Milan.