Anastasia Ashley’s butt is a marketing genius. Or whoever is in control of her butt, anyway. A puppet-master’s dream, I imagine.
Last year, Anastasia released a short video of her butt with some surfing at the end. Kudos, this time anyway, to her for getting some surfing in there. Here’s the truth: butts make people watch (as if you didn’t just click on that). I’m not advocating it. I’m just stating the obvious. Whether it’s because they love butts or they hate that people love butts, butts make people watch – especially when they’re wiggling all over the place with a bikini jammed up there like a string on a pot roast.
Take the above video, for example. It’s a butt and a turn. A great butt (sorry, butt-lover haters!) followed by a pretty average turn. No one would watch this just for the turn, but thousands will watch for the butt preceding the turn. Whether they’re watching with veins bursting in anger or pants bursting in lust, they’re watching.
Here’s the thing: all that public vitriol, all that anger, all that hair pulling and eye-gouging and spittle spitting doesn’t do anything for the veins-bursting-in-anger cause. All it does is feed the hungry, view-eating marketing mouth. That mouth doesn’t much care whether those views are angry or sexually frustrated, just as long as its hunger is sated.
And as long as that hunger is sated, those suit-wearing marketing men (yes, they’re probably men, or at the very least, incredibly devious women) are up in their dark towers scheming on which butt will get the most views for their brand. It’s a pretty simple formula. From the standpoint of someone who works in an industry where clicks are carefully monitored, there are a few things that sell: Death/injury (our morbid fascination with other people’s pain is sickening), extraordinary feats, sex, and of course, baby monkeys riding backwards pigs. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that sex and death SHOULD be what people look at, but they do. I can’t understand that, but it doesn’t matter what I understand, because it’s painfully obvious when you look at the numbers. I can understand sex – it’s hardwired in humans. Marketing sex isn’t bad, but marketing women as sex objects is.
“I’ve always said that I want to maintain my level of credibility,” say Anastasia Ashley in an interview with The Huffington Post. “Sometimes it’s really hard when people want to run the modeling photo over the surfing photo.”
It may be hard, but she’s playing the game, and she’s playing it very well. Because of the inherent differences between the vast majority of men and the vast majority of women, I’d wager money on it that an average male surfer will never make it using sex as his main marketing tool. Sad as it is, Anastasia Ashley and her butt’s puppet-master are really just playing into our base instincts, and we’re falling for it.
“You can’t take it too seriously, because it’s a never-ending battle,” she says in the same interview. It may be construed as a bit of a defeatist’s attitude, but it’s also a very realistic one.
When we first posted this, we posed a question via social media: True of False: Anastasia Ashley and her butt: Marketing geniuses.
Two identical posts – same times, same link, same question. The only difference was the photo. We wanted to see the public’s reaction to a butt over a surf shot… and the results were pretty clear. Anastasia and her butt are marketing geniuses.
Butt: 16 Shares, 165 likes, 34 comments, 21,488 views.
Surf: 1 Share, 4 comments, 39 likes, 7,204 views.
