Orangina: Naturally Juicy

This is an advertisement for the soft drink Orangina. It features sexually suggestive anthropomorphic animals pole-dancing, spraying each other with liquid and an octopus stripper giving a lap dance to a bear. This commercial rightfully earned it's title as the "Freakiest Advert of 2008". A print advert was also used (See below). These adverts appear to have little to do with the product, the only parallel I can identify is their slogan is "Naturally Juicy" and animals are natural. Their reasoning for including intra-species bestiality seems unclear and makes the audience feel uncomfortable. Advertisers often use provocative imagery to capture the consumer's attention (Ford & LaTour, 1993) however I feel Orangina have taken the notion of "Sex sells" too far. Orangina is also an advert mainly aimed at children and the provocative content of this advert has been greatly criticized because of this.

LaTour and Henthorne (1994) investigated the extent to which advertisements with sexual features are effective on consumers. This study involved giving participants photograph advertisements with either mild or strong sexual appeal. The former included fully clothed male and female models wearing jeans and holding hands, however they are not dressed overly conservatively and the female's arm was around the male models waist under his shirt. The alternate ad, with strong sexual appeal, includes a a sexual embrace between a nude female model and a male model wearing only jeans with the fly unzipped. Both advertisements sold jeans as their product.

Following looking at one of the adverts, participants were required to fill in a questionnaire in which their attitude  towards the ad and the brand were measured along items such as 'Offensive', 'Informative' and 'Appealing' along a seven point Likert scale ranging from "yes, definitely" = 7 to "no, definitely not" = 1. Their purchase intention, "Next time I purchase jeans I will purchase (brand name) jeans" and their ethical views towards the ads, such as "Culturally acceptable" and "Morally right" were also measured along a seven-point scale. The results showed that the ad using overt sexual appeals resulted in undesirable reactions along all of these aspects, and that both men and women had ethical concerns over the use of strong sexual adverts.

As people are made uneasy by overtly sexualized ads, it is no wonder that this Orangina ad was so poorly received. Not only was the advert overly provocative, it also involved the sexualization of animals, which causes most people to feel extremely uncomfortable.


Fors, J. B., & LaTour, M. S. (1993). Differing reactions to female role portrayals in advertising. Journal of Advertising Research, 33, 43-52.
LaTour, M. S., & Henthorne, T. L. (1994). Ethical judgments on sexual appeals in print advertising. Journal  of Advertising, 23, (3), 81-90.