Ok I realise that I did not put the previous comment in the friendliest form, sorry about that !
Your point is that the marketing choice of using beautiful women is dictated by the sellers’ preferences rather that the buyers’ one. In the apparent absence of evidence to support either hypothesis, you are willing to favor the former one.
What I haven’t said explicitly yet is that there is one argument that makes me find the latter one more likely in the absence of further evidence : the businesses that make their marketing choices based on customers’ preferences will tend to survive more. kn our capitalist society, it makes sense to me.
You gave one counter-example that is not strong enough to change my opinion as it can also be explained with the firm having poorly evaluated what their target audience was. They do say in the article that more women started buying tyres after the marketing change, which is indeed not the audience targeted with the sexy-girl ad.
It does however a good job at disproving the affirmation “because everyone regardless of gender and age are biologically conditioned to look at them.” to which you were originally replying, and I disagree with that affirmation as well. I just think your conclusion goes too far i the other direction, in the absence of further evidence.
The one example I was commenting about is the tyre example. They sold more tyres to women after dropping the sexy girl on the ad. How much of a stretch is it to assume that these women were not the sexy ad’s target audience because women used to be less (socially allowed to get) interested in cars?