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Sharper Image
650 Davis Street
San Francisco, Ca
(415) 445-6000

Our Gallery of Offenders is for educational purposes, and to give our web site visitors the chance to contact media-makers directly to tell them what they think. The items are mostly chosen from the U.S. mainstream media available in the last year, using an independent process. We are never making fun of models/actors themselves, but the environment they exist within. Please submit your picks on our Contact page.

Selling Megan Fox’s body, not Sharper Image products

Questions to Consider:

• What product is the ad selling?
• How is it selling it?
• Why is Megan Fox reclining on a bed?
• Does she make the product look better?

What We Think:

Sharper Image reverts back to the old days of advertising via sexualizing women by choosing Megan Fox as their model for their holiday season campaign “Guys Love Gadgets”. According to Sharper Image, if there is one thing men love more than gadgets, it’s Megan Fox in skimpy clothing. In these ads, Megan Fox strips down to her lingerie and makes sexy and sultry faces to sell electronics.

Looking at these ads makes one question, “What does a half naked woman have to do with selling gadgets and electronics?” Nothing! You wouldn’t be able to tell these ads were for Sharper Image — or any electronics store for that matter — because the photograph has one, at most two electronics in it. In one of the ads, we see Megan Fox wearing thigh-high stockings and a white blouse, laying across a bed. If you look closely, you will find the electronics: the tablet computer in her hand, and in the nightstand behind her, a clock. This campaign is offensive and just gives into the notion that sexualizing women is effective and the only way to sell products. We’d be interested to know if it actually worked anymore, or if Sharper Image is still functioning in the Ice Age. — Nickole Mariona

Where we saw it: usmagazine.com; October 23, 2012

What Do You Think?