Sex Sells (your product)?

Its long been known that sex appeal in marketing materials is an effective tactic to get people to look at the material, but I wonder how effective it is at actually moving more product?

The poser over at NewsTarget has just put up an interesting new rant^H^H^H^Harticle about how advertising treats people like lab animals. His observation is that advertisers use the media to build an association in the consumers mind between a product like softdrinks and sex so that the consumer will be more likely to buy the softdrink. This is reinforced by the spike of carbs delivered by the drink.

Naturally he hasn't done any acutal research, and his site is little more than a crappy blog dressed up as a news site (what do you expect from a spammer and shyster?), but he does come up with some entertaining and thought provoking stuff on occasion (the rest of the time its fun to just laugh at him).

So I was thinking, I wonder how hard it would be to find a research group of men with very low sex hormone levels, such that they had low or no sex drive. It would be interesting to use a large group of these men along with a control group of typical men to study the effectivness of the 'Sex Sells' idea. Do men with very low sexual drive respond differently to sex-based advertising?

What other interesting sex-related studies might such a group be good for? Do they tend to pay female employees more? Do they promote them faster and give them better work assignments? Are they more productive in business environments because they don't constantly think evil things about their female coworkers? Are they just boring and deprived?

So many mysteries of the mind and body, so litte actual knowledge.