14 September 2007

More British Birds Without Much Clothing On . . .

. . . this time it's in the form of a little game.

Daily Mail had an article written by an improbably named woman who used to edit Esquire (Rosie Boycott), and she was complaining that the depiction of scantily (or completely unclad) clad women in the current generation of "Lads' Mags" was more demeaning and reinforcing of inequality between the sexes than her more tasteful and equality affirming depictions of hot women with little covering. Her article doesn't just attack the mags, though, she's also critical of young women for willingly exploiting themselves, and confusing freedom with sluttiness (or is that sluttiness with freedom?).

I'm not going to argue the merits of her argument, I'll just link to it. Reading the article I noticed that one of the most popular (and raunchy) of the "Lads Mags" NUTS, has just started a TV channel. They also have a website at Nuts.tv.

There's a variety of video and content aimed at the young male Brit audience. They've got lots of discussion regarding "footie", some stuff about "gear", and of course, plenty of young women, plenty uncovered.

Speaking of largely uncovered women, this series of videos featuring two well endowed women playing Wii topless is fascinating. There are four (NSFW) videos (part 1, 2, 3, 4), in each you are supposed to guess which sport they are playing on the Wii. It's not too hard to figure out. Wii Sports is the pack-in game with the Wii console and has five sports represented. You can figure out four of them by watching the videos (or just follow the wiki link), but there are only four videos in this Nuts series. I guess they figured their audience wouldn't be interested in watching these two young women play baseball (even topless). Damn provincial of them, don't they know they might attract audience over the web from baseball lovers as well?

This is 'tease' rather than porn. Still rather juvenille, and silly, but it definitely has its place within the media landscape.

Also, to rate the titillation factor of each game, I'd rank boxing lowest as the guard position limits the view, and I'd rank golf the highest, as the ready position for a golf swing (at least as performed by the women in the video) is pleasingly provocative.

Another thing, the popularity and link love sites like Daily Mail and Nuts gets outside of their home market presents a challenge to marketers. The adverts (since we're talking UK, I'll use the UK word for ads) are still aimed at the UK market, even though I'm linking from a USA based ISP. If they want to leverage their non-home market traffic, they need to find a way to serve ads that reflect the home market of the viewer, rather than the content provider. The technology is there, and because of the frequent Drudge links, the US traffic for Daily Mail is high, so US based advertisers would be smart to send some dollars Daily Mail's way.

There's a big revenue stream just waiting to be exploited.

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