Marketing
Since the beginning of the 1990s, BDSM imagery has been regularly used within the framework of large marketing campaigns in continental Europe. Widely known examples in Germany are billboards of the cigarette brands Camel and West, showing a camel dressed in "typical" leather outfit, respectively a dominatrix with a whip. While West had to withdraw the ad due to "offense against morality", BDSM motifs were utilized in the following years on a regular basis. In March 2007 the Swedish clothing company H&M promoted the sale of a collection compiled by Madonna with television commercials in Germany. The commercials showed the artist, who has been repeatedly criticized for the use of sadomasochistic subjects in the past, as a dominant lifestyle-icon teaching a lesson to a "inappropriately" dressed female pupil under the cracking of a crop, redesigning her outfit while making fashion statements like "Don't think it – you need to know it".
In Canada Mini presented the winter package 2005/2005 of the Mini-Cooper in the form of an interactive BDSM-session in which the user, supported by a dominatrix, can test different kinds of spanking tools on the automobile in order to get the optional equipment explained. Their slogan was "Dominate winter".
Fischer, a German manufacturer of fasteners, used a persiflage of the sadomasochistic subjet in a video spot in order to demonstrate its product's quality.
In the U.S., Anheuser-Busch has repeatedly sponsored the fetish-lifestyle Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco. Also, Diesel jeans ran several sadomasochistic-themed advertisements in various fashion magazines. The basic strategy in this field is to present BDSM clichés in a light-hearted manner, thus generating a higher level of public awareness while branding the image as unconventional and avant garde.
Wonderful Pistachios TV campaign: In the fall of 2009 Isabella Sinclair appeared as a latex-clad dominatrix in a tongue-in-cheek television commercial airing in the U.S. for Wonderful Pistachios. In the ad, she places a single pistachio on a chair, steps back, then cracks it open with her whip. The voice-over tag line is "Dominatrices do it on command." This was part of a series of "Get Crackin'" ads featuring celebrities who open pistachio nuts in their own unique way. Sinclair is a real-life dominatrix, actress, and founder of GwenMedia, a company that produces fetish videos.
Read more about this topic: BDSM In Culture And Media