Sex sells skiing - again
Saturday May 23, 2009 - Email this article to a friend

Lange boots has been using scantily clad women to promote its ski boots for years and, though perhaps not quite as famous as the girls in the Pirelli calendar, they have picked up quite a following.

There are even web sites devoted to past promotions and the posters have become collector's items.

Now we see from our friends over at Snowheads that Mount Ruapehu in New Zealand has launched an advertising campaign in Australia that is full of innuendo about the ski area.

These are some of the slogans;

Last season's Lange girl“I have never seen my partner go down so fast or so often.”

"It was like a 25-minute orgasm."

"My girlfriend was right. Size does matter."

"A friend of mine suffers from erectile dysfunction. He still does but now he’s a much better skier."

The advertising campaign is targeted at New South Wales and Queensland in Australia.

"It's a great campaign and has certainly brought the resort to people's attention.  Personally I won't be going all the way to New Zealand to ski as we have a few good mountains here but it's a bit of a laugh isn't it?!" says PlanetSKI reader, Phil Frewer who lives in Australia.

“We considered the size, length and variety of ski runs on Mt Ruapehu and wrapped it up into a creative that is laced with sexual innuendo – an old fashioned marketing ploy!” says the resort’s marketing manager, Mike Smith.

PlanetSKI will have a reporter in Mount Ruapehu this winter.  Matt Rivers will be working there all season as an instructor so he’ll let us know if the campaign has worked.

The winter season starts in Mount Ruapehu on June 20th.

As well as Lange boots and Mount Ruapehu, Columbia has been using it this season with a series of posters. Here is one we saw in Switzerland.

Alain Baxter also went bare to raise money for his bid to get to the Vancouver Winter Olympics.

While Burton put semi-naked Playboy models on its snowboards last winter and caused a stir as some thought it was de-grading to women.

The Austrian resort of Ischgl promotes itself using its famous semi-naked girls who dance for free to get the men in buying beer in many of the apres ski venues.

And not one to miss a bit of self-promotion, Paris Hilton has put a partially clad picture of herself on a monoboard.  We saw it in an Austrian resort at the beginning of the winter.

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