Axe says men are their hair, women are their cleavage

This Axe ad is extra weird: a disembodied male haircut falls in lust with some disembodied breasts:



But is its message true?

A 2012 study by Think Eye Tracking showed men and women these two photos:

Here's a "heat map"which shows how women stared at the image:

Here's the same, for men:

Red is "hot," meaning that those parts were stared at most intensely. Green is just a glance. (And I have no idea why they couldn't use a shot of a man looking at the camera.)

Here is the conclusion:

Women pay more attention to his left hand; he is wearing a wedding ring. Men are less interested in the marital status of the young lady and pay more attention to her face, breasts and stomach. 

Whereas the women looked at her bikini the men are frankly just not interested in what she is wearing! This level of detail would be impossible to gain from traditional market research techniques of asking people what they remember looking. 

As I said, people don’t always tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Few men would have volunteered that they looked at the man’s assets partly because it’s a social taboo but also because glances can happen so quickly that they simply did not register in the conscious mind. 

In the same way that participants who take part in research often don’t have clear insight into why they make decisions.

Interestingly, another study using sexually explicit images, found:

...men are more likely than women to first look at a woman's face before other parts of the body, and women focused longer on photographs of men performing sexual acts with women than did the males. 

Gender stereotyping: it's complicated.

Tip via AdFreak