Guest writer

Racy card played

Sexy ads not unique to retailer

Recently, while responding to an analyst’s downgrade of Abercrombie & Fitch’s stock price, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said the clothing retailer’s ads featuring scantily clad teens are similar to soft-core porn and he’s tired of it.

There’s nothing wrong with provocative advertising. Does Abercrombie push the envelope a little? Sure, but it has to be working, because the retailer’s demo customers, teenagers and people in their early 20s, have kept its stock at a highly regarded price.

With the help of the brand’s advertising, investors have enjoyed record profits and a stock quote that has perked the interest of almost every trader on Wall Street the past decade.

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There’s one constant that Abercrombie’s marketing has always been able to maintain: attracting the attention of young people, its target demographic.

When I was in college and my A&F Quarterly arrived in my mailbox, I would have to hide the catalog in my dorm room to keep my fraternity brothers and my roommates’ friends from looking at it all the time. Several were even stolen.

The cover of the A&F Quarterly with somewhat scantily clad young people on the cover was always appealing to college students. The models may have looked alluring, but the A&F Quarterly was still all about the clothes and their prices. A&F Quarterly’s last issue was published in 2003.

Cramer’s disapproval toward Abercrombie’s controversial advertising isn’t new. Since the retail company’s re-establishment in 1988, its advertising campaigns have been criticized and accused of being sexually explicit and racist by religious groups, network news correspondents and daytime talk-show hosts.

When one popular talk-show host saw a racy Abercrombie ad, she stated that the founders, David T. Abercrombie and Ezra Fitch, would be turning over in their graves if they could see the sort of advertising their company was putting into print.

With a quarterly revenue surpassing $1.1 billion in 2012, the founders probably wouldn’t be that perturbed by what Abercrombie’s advertising department is green-lighting. Retail success and longevity is more important when it comes to legacy-not a few ads that make a small segment of people, who have no intention of buying your clothes anyway, uncomfortable.

Aéropostale and American Eagle Outfitters do just as provocative advertising as Abercrombie, but the latter gets all of the guff and negative publicity for it. Recently, I saw an enormous billboard for American Eagle Outfitters that had three young models (one female, two male) in a very suggestive pose that probably would make anyone over 25 wince.

You won’t hear Jim Cramer or anyone else on CNBC say anything negative about American Eagle’s advertising. Could it be because Abercrombie is more successful, and the retail store that has the higher stock quote gets the most attention?

Success sometimes has a way of attracting controversy, but business analysts need to be fair.

At least since Brooke Shields said, “Want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing,” for Calvin Klein Jeans in 1981, nearly every retail company that targets young people has used sex to attract customers.

Labeling a company’s advertising campaign as “porn” is very dangerous. When people start drawing a line, declaring what’s porn and what’s not in our society, things could get really dicey.

The charge of something being pornographic is a serious one. It’s not an accusation you make lightly in our sometimes ultra-sensitive culture.

One afternoon, Jim Cramer should leave the CNBC studios and take a walk down to Times Square. He would be hard-pressed to find a billboard ad that’s not sexually evocative. It would be a stunning feat if he found five conservative, family-friendly ads. With 30 percent of Internet traffic being searches for pornography-an all-time high-sexually charged ads attempting to lure young customers will become even more prevalent.

Abercrombie does make sexually suggestive ads, but critics need to spread the condemnation around to other retail chains aimed at young shoppers.

Contrary to what Mr. Cramer may believe, Abercrombie & Fitch didn’t invent sexually evocative advertising; it’s just mastered the ability to produce ads that boil some Americans’ blood.

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David C. Cutler of Rogers has a small business, Résuméworks.

Editorial, Pages 17 on 11/13/2013

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