Sex in Advertising: 3 Different Companies, 3 Different Stories

As Sydney Sweeney has proven, more than once, sex in advertising still works. “Sex sells,” if you will. Until it doesn’t. And while many ad agencies and social media mavens will tout the “engagement” and “brand awareness” of the latest Novig ad, the real measure for any business is what happens after the ad runs. There are many examples of firms trying to break through the noise to drive revenue. Alcohol companies have done it for ages, Hollywood does it constantly. But, for the most part, they know where the line is and how not to completely cross it. Other businesses, not so much. And the easiest way to tell is how they behave in the long run.

Where We Left Off

In my last post, I walked through Novig’s Sydney Sweeney ad and one clean historical comparison: Carl’s Jr.’s 2005 Paris Hilton campaign, where same-store sales grew just 1.7% during the ad’s four-week run, slower than the chain’s own 2.3% underlying growth rate that year. The reaction to Sweeney’s ad has only grown since, across sports media, culture columns, and just about every corner of the internet, just as Carl’s Jr.’s Hilton ad did back then, further proof of the attention side of this equation.

But that comparison only works because CKE was public in 2005 and had to disclose the number. What happened at that same company since, first going private, then walking away from the strategy entirely, then bringing it back a decade later, is the real story. And it’s a longer, stranger story than a single overtly sexual campaign.

When the Discipline Doesn’t Stick: Carl’s Jr.

Paris Hilton was the first racy Carl’s Jr. ad with a real number attached to it, in 2005. The run that followed, Kate Upton, Kim Kardashian, Charlotte McKinney, Sara Sampaio, Hannah Ferguson, Ronda Rousey, Kara Del Toro, lasted twelve years.

Padma Lakshmi’s 2009 Hardee’s (the East coast sibling of Carl’s Jr.) campaign is the fuzzy middle case from that run. It launched in a quarter where Hardee’s had already posted two straight positive periods that CEO Andy Puzder explicitly credited to “the success of our premium product strategy,” not the ad. Hardee’s finished that quarter up 2.5%, but unlike the Paris Hilton case, CKE never isolated what the celebrity campaign itself contributed.

Then in 2010, private equity firm Apollo Management took CKE private in a roughly $1 billion deal. Every celebrity ad after that carries a complete disclosure blackout: no same-store sales, no revenue figures, no data of any kind to check the ad’s effectiveness against. What the company started reporting instead was media impressions: 2 billion for the Upton ad, 4 billion for McKinney’s by the following May. CEO Puzder’s own summary of the strategy in a 2015 interview was an aggregate, campaign-agnostic line: “sales were up 5 percent at established locations in the second half of its last fiscal year.” No ad attached, no isolation, just a company-wide number offered as context.

In March 2017, with Puzder gone and public pressure mounting, CKE actually stopped this strategy. In fact, the company ran a self-aware campaign built around a fictional “Carl Hardee Sr.” character mocking its own history, and by January 2018 the pivot was official: burgers, not bikinis. And for eight years, they stayed the course.

Then, in February 2025, Carl’s Jr. brought it back. TikTok influencer Alix Earle starred in a Super Bowl-adjacent ad for the “Hangover Burger” that explicitly nodded to the brand’s 2000s and 2010s history, and a follow-up “Queso Crunch Burger” spot brought Paris Hilton herself back for a cameo, nearly twenty years after her original ad. What did Carl’s Jr. report afterward? A 222% year-over-year jump in social media performance for the month, the brand’s best of 2025. A 47% engagement rate on the key Instagram post. A 91% increase in followers. 2.5 million views and over 200,000 engagements on Alix Earle’s TikTok post in just two days. Every one of those numbers measures attention. The sales results, the foot-traffic numbers, the results the campaign was actually built to drive? Those are the ones CKE kept to itself.

This is the real shape of the Carl’s Jr. story: a company that already proved it could go the controversial round and then find the discipline to rein it in for the better part of a decade, then went right back to it the moment the original justification for stopping (“millennials don’t care about women in bikinis anymore”) stopped mattering to whoever was making the call.

The Rest of the Story: During the first eight years CKE used the provocative ads, CKE grew its store count 16%, while competitors like McDonald’s (19%) had healthy growth and Five Guys (467%) exploded using almost no traditional advertising. And around the time of the second campaign, CKE grew its stores 4%, while McDonald’s (22%) and Shake Shack (210%) grew much faster. Neither the market leader (McDonald’s) nor the much smaller market challengers (Five Guys, Shake Shack) needed to resort to CKE’s tactics to drive such growth.

When the Research Backs It Up: GoDaddy’s Calculated Exit

GoDaddy is the case that complicates a tidy “sex in advertising never pays off” story, because for GoDaddy, it demonstrably did.

GoDaddy’s first Super Bowl spot, in 2005, spoofed Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” from the previous year’s halftime show, the exact controversy still dominating water-cooler conversation at the time. From there, the company built an entire identity around it: race car driver Danica Patrick became the “GoDaddy Girl” starting in 2007 and went on to appear in 13 Super Bowl ads over the next decade, more than any other celebrity in the game’s history. The most notorious spot, 2013’s “The Kiss,” paired Patrick with supermodel Bar Refaeli in an ad built around a prolonged make-out scene with a nerdy tech employee, so racy that CBS rejected the network’s initial cut and forced a tamer version onto the air.

After the company’s first Super Bowl ad in 2005, its share of new domain registrations reportedly jumped from 16% to 25% in a single week. Founder Bob Parsons kept escalating from there, through more than a decade of ads built around models and innuendo.

Here’s the part that matters more than the shock value: GoDaddy realized that their target wasn’t the frat boys who gave their ads lots of attention. It was small business owners, and more than half of that market women. So, in 2013, chief marketing officer Barb Rechterman said the company discovered through research that customers enjoyed the edginess “but they wanted us to talk to them in a bit more of a grown-up tone and manner.” When 2014 rolled around the ads centered on real small-business owners instead of scantily clad supermodels, with a clear message that GoDaddy’s focus was to “be one with the small-business owner.”

GoDaddy proved the attention-buying strategy worked, then had the discipline to stop when they heard what customers actually wanted.

GoDaddy remains the largest domain registrar in the world by a wide margin. The company is publicly traded, pulled in $4.95 billion in revenue in 2025, and holds roughly 10.8% global market share, with more than 91 million domains under management for over 20 million customers. The market itself exploded around it: total registered domains worldwide went from roughly 50 million in 2005 to nearly 387 million today, and the number of competing registrars roughly tripled, from under 1,000 to more than 2,800. GoDaddy’s slice didn’t shrink. Its nearest competitors, Namecheap and GMO Internet, still hold single-digit shares by comparison.

When the Culture Shifts: Victoria’s Secret

Victoria’s Secret is a different case entirely. The formula that built Victoria’s Secret into an $8.1 billion brand also broke it, once culture moved and leadership didn’t move with it.

In November 2018, CMO Ed Razek told Vogue the brand’s annual fashion show wouldn’t feature transgender or plus-size models because the show is “a fantasy.” The comment landed inside a business that was already struggling: the show’s ratings had fallen roughly 30% between 2016 and 2017, and Victoria’s Secret’s same-store sales dropped 5% for the full year. The company’s stock fell 41% in 2018. Razek resigned the following August, and L Brands cancelled the fashion show entirely in November 2019, ending a run that had defined the brand since the 1990s.

That comment landed at a moment when the culture around beauty standards was already shifting. The body-positivity movement had spent the 2010s building real mainstream traction, and diverse, size-inclusive representation had gone from a niche demand to a standard expectation in fashion and advertising. Razek’s comment landed right in the middle of that shift and confirmed, in the company’s own words, that Victoria’s Secret didn’t plan to move with it.

Some would argue Victoria’s Secret hasn’t changed much after all the controversy. I’d push back on that, and the company’s own numbers back it up. At its peak in 2018, Victoria’s Secret controlled roughly a third of the North American intimates market and did $8.1 billion in sales. Rebuilding from that took years, and a new CEO. When the fashion show finally returned in October 2025, the cast told the story on its own: a visibly pregnant model opened the show, featuring longtime Angels in their forties, plus-size models, and professional athletes, casting that simply wouldn’t have happened at the brand’s earlier peak. CEO Hillary Super’s read on why this works now, and wouldn’t have a decade ago, is generational: Gen Z shoppers didn’t grow up carrying the body-image weight millennials associate with the brand’s 2000s heyday, so they can enjoy the spectacle without mistaking it for a standard to live up to. This is how Victoria’s Secret succeeds where others fail: it didn’t erase its history. It adapted to a new definition of glamour.

This is a different scenario than Carl’s Jr. or GoDaddy, and it might be the more important one for mid-market CEOs to sit with. Nobody’s disputing that Victoria’s Secret’s sexualized branding worked, for decades. The mistake was running the strategy past the point where the culture it depended on had already shifted.

The Rest of the Story: Victoria’s Secret & Co. is publicly traded, generated roughly $6.1 billion in revenue for the fiscal year ending January 2025, and still holds an estimated 18 to 20 percent share of the North American intimate apparel market, the largest position of any specialty retailer in the category. The business survived its reckoning. It’s just not the same business anymore.

What Connects These Three Stories

Put side by side, these three companies illustrate three different failures along the same spectrum, but all three are, at their core, the same bet: that sex in advertising can carry a brand further than the product alone.

Carl’s Jr. shows something more unsettling than a company that never had to answer for the strategy. It shows that discipline can be proven and still not stick. The company held back for eight years, then went right back to the same playbook, and the same disclosure blackout, the moment the original reason for stopping stopped mattering to whoever was making the call. GoDaddy shows that the strategy can genuinely work, and that knowing when to stop is a real, disclosed, deliberate business decision, made on purpose rather than stumbled into, and kept. Victoria’s Secret shows that a strategy’s execution can expire even when its emotional core survives. The company kept selling glamour and spectacle, but only after rebuilding who got to represent it for a culture that had moved on.

Novig, the subject of my last post, is closest to Carl’s Jr.’s original, pre-2017 pattern right now: private, unaccountable to public markets, reporting a huge mentions spike with no revenue number behind it. Whether it eventually earns GoDaddy’s kind of restraint, has to evolve like Victoria’s Secret, or simply waits for the moment to come back around the way Carl’s Jr. did, is a question only time, and eventually its own unlikely disclosures, will answer.

What This Means If You’re Building a Long-Term Brand

Most of my clients will never run an ad provocative enough to end up in a piece like this one, and that’s not the point. The point is that every one of these three companies faced the same questions eventually, and so will you if your brand ever leans on attention over substance: How do you know if it’s actually working, how do you know when to stop, and, the harder one Carl’s Jr. actually answered once and still lost, how do you make sure that discipline holds the next time the same temptation shows up?

In my experience, brands answer the first question honestly far more often than they answer the second one in time, and almost none of them plan for the third at all. The honest answer to “is it working” requires a real number tied to the campaign, something a vanity metric tied to the moment can’t provide. The honest answer to “when do we stop” requires watching your brand’s relationship to the culture around you, since your own internal comfort with a strategy that’s always worked before won’t tell you when it turns toxic. And the honest answer to “can you fix it, or just pause it” requires something sturdier than one good decision: a real evolution built into how the company operates, not just a pause that lasts exactly as long as whoever made the call stays in charge.