To break through the clutter of advertisements, some advertisers uses sexual appeal as a technique to increase visibility and sales. The purpose of this study is to examine, from a Swedish and South Korean perspective, how the attitude towards sexual appeal in advertising differ between generations. Culture and age has been proven to be factors affecting attitude towards advertisements, and previous research has found that the attitude towards sexual appeal in advertising between Swedish and South Korean university students only differed slightly. To examine the attitudes, data was collected through a questionnaire. The results suggest that the attitudes of each age group are generally rather similar, regardless of culture. Ages 18 to 30 showed most negativity towards sexual appeal in advertisements.

The purpose of this study is to address and understand how shock advertising can be used for the social marketing of non-profit organisations in Sweden. To better understand shock advertising in the Swedish context a case study of a campaign published by the Swedish non-profit organisation Talita, with the purpose of bringing attention and awareness to the problem of prostitution happening at younger ages in Sweden, is performed. The study uses reception analysis to gain insights to the contexts and ways the campaign was encoded as well as decoded by intended audiences.  The study begins with a content analysis of the material that provides information on how Talita and the communication agency responsible for the campaign encoded the information. After information on the context and encoding is analysed, three focus group interviews are performed with groups of teachers and parents of children aged 12–17 are presented. This is done to understand how they interpret and construct meaning from the campaign. The information from these interviews is thematized and analysed to be able to compare it with the organisation’s intended interpretations.  The result from this reception analysis showed that the shock advertising in this campaign was negotiated by the audience. The study even confirmed former research and found that elements of shock can lead to oppositional readings due to the audience feeling overwhelmed by the content and choosing therefore to do nothing or purposefully ignore advertisements. The case study was able to provide supporting evidence on media resistance and provide a contextual case example for how a specific Swedish audience of media consumers understand shock advertising in social marketing done by nonprofits.