Web Ads Show Just How Sexy These Clothes Make You Feel

The Internet is rapidly changing the rules of advertising -- but using naked people to sell clothes?

A French clothier is testing the limits of the maxim that sex sells with online commercials that use hard-core pornography to hawk $100 T-shirts.

The campaign by Shai clothing depicts French porn stars frolicking on a circular bed, clothed, at least initially, in the brand's latest styles.

Shai's effort also foreshadows a trend in interactive marketing: giving viewers the ability to click on moving images in a commercial to buy clothing, movie tickets and other goods on screen. Rolling the mouse pointer over a piece of apparel in the Shai clip stops the video and pulls up a chart with price and size information.

The interactive stag film as fashion catalog is an extreme example of advertisers adapting their messages to the Internet, by making spots more compelling with storytelling or radical content and hoping people will forward the clips to friends.

And because the Internet can bypass traditional gatekeepers like publishers and TV networks, advertisers like Shai can create highly targeted niche campaigns that would be taboo in mainstream media.

"One of the things that is kind of intriguing about it is that ... on the Web, you don't have to worry about standards boards. You are getting rid of all your lines of censorship," said Tom Reichert, who teaches advertising at the University of Georgia at Athens and wrote "The Erotic History of Advertising."

Jeff Lanctot, the Seattle-based vice president of ad agency Avenue A/Razorfish, said future-looking marketers once dreamt that shows like "Friends" could prompt an instant buying frenzy.

"Years ago there were predictions that you'd be able to click to buy Jennifer Aniston's sweater," Lanctot said. "That time has come, but Jennifer Aniston has been replaced by a porn star. It's another sign where pornography is right on the front lines of a lot of new trends."

The technology of layering commerce onto Web video is known in advertising circles as hotspotting. It hasn't hit the Web in force, in part because such ads are expensive and time-consuming to create. Video is a small, fast-growing part of the $17-billion market for online ads, but for the most part marketers are simply shortening standard TV commercials for the Web.

PointRoll, a unit of publisher Gannett Co. that develops ad-delivery technology, is working with movie studios to produce trailers that link to the Fandango online ticketing service.