He grew up during the great depression, and as a teen he yearned to fight for his country in World War II.

His work ethic is unparalleled. He grew up on a Midwest farm watching his father tend to the family farm in darkness before and after every long shift driving for Sinclair. He knew what hard work was.

He worked hard and built an advertising agency from scratch. I like to think that I inherited and learned his work ethic. When it’s time to grind, I can grind with the best of them.

But as much as I love my generation, Gen X cannot compare with my father’s generation. It was the “greatest generation,” after all.

I’m neither historian nor sociologist, but I would argue that the greatness was born of pain and suffering. It was forged in blood and sweat. My uncle Vic went to war without seeing his wife for year. Mothers cared for their families, played the role of both parents, and Rosie and her rivets helped win the war, too.

These kids today

Which brings us to today. The Millennial generation. Gen Y. Echo boomers.

And although I don’t feel like an old man, I shake my head at them.

I love young people. It’s a big part of the reason that I am a professor. One-on-one, these kids are great.

But they are frustrating.

I see so little hunger. So little drive. Every generation has asked “is this going to be on the test?” But this generation has perfected it.

They just won’t work for me the way that kids did even eight years ago.

They just seem to want to punch the clock.

And I’ve tried to inspire them. And I am bad at a lot of things, but inspiration is kind of my thing.

They do have their talents. And they do have different priorities. And I respect that.

Evolution in the mean world

Allow me to shift gears for a moment.

In perhaps the greatest college course I ever took (Q530), Indiana’s Mike Gasser taught us computer programming methods as they related to cognitive science.

It was life changing. In one of the programs, we were in charge of a simple simulated world. There were creatures, plants, rocks, and predators.

The creatures could not learn. They had a simple genetic code. The world was simple: it punished creatures for bumping into rocks, it rewarded them for eating plants, and they died if eaten by a predator.

Their genes told them what to do when a rock, predator, or plant were nearby.

Smart creatures went left when a predator or rock were to their right, and they went right when a plant was to their right.

The “world” was governed by a genetic algorithm. Dumb critters were killed by predators or forgot to eat. Smart critters mated reproduced.

It was truly evolution of the fittest.

There was a curious lesson in this critter world. As the programmer, we could vary the “pain” inflicted by rocks and the nutrient value of the food.

When the world was new, if you made rock bumping too painful or food too nonnutritious, then all the creatures died, none mated, and the species was extinct.

If you left the world just as it was, nothing changed. There was almost no evolution. You were stuck with the same random gene pool with which you started.

However, if you gradually make rocks hurt more and food slightly less wholesome, the inferior critters’ weaknesses were eventually exposed.

With each successive generation, you could make the world harder. Evolution became more powerful.

Within 10 generations, you could make the world so hostile that any new species would quickly go extinct. But the evolved critters thrived. They were born of a mean world.

Eventually, a rock bump could prove nearly fatal, and a critter could need to eat dozens of plants a day to survive.

This was an amazing hostile world.

Critters were now plant hunting, predator and rock hating machines.

The key lesson was: evolution only works when the world gets hard.

A new millennium

I wish we were continuing the economic expansion started during the Clinton administration. I would never wish a recession on anyone.

People are suffering. My friends are suffering. It’s bad.

But given that we’re here, I’m looking for the silver lining.

And if there is to be a silver lining, I think that this recession will work on Gen Y like a mean world worked on those critters.

Today’s freshmen were born in 1991. They have never experienced anything like the Great Depression.

The world was always good, the stock market was always expanding, and there were always more jobs than job seekers.

That changes now.

I hope they will see that the world can be mean. And they have to compete.

If I were a freshman now, I’d be terrified.

And I think that’s a good thing.

I think this will awaken the competitive nature inside of them. There is greatness there.

To me, the thing that makes America amazing is that we can rise to a challenge. We always rise to the challenge.

And this generation has too much tech savvy to be so pedestrian in the classroom.

And I really hope this is the spark that makes them the next greatest generation.

We’re an evolved species, and the genes of those who didn’t like sex aren’t around anymore.

For this reason, naked and scantily clad people are arousing. In my lab, we put electrodes on participants’ palms to measure activity in the eccrine sweat glands, or skin conductance.

The formula is simple. When you see a naked person — even if they’re not real — your body prepares for action. Your sympathetic nervous system activates, your palms begin to sweat below the surface of the skin, and you have a cascade of physiological responses associated with approach.

So it comes as no surprise that advertising drips with sexuality. They’re betting that sex gets your attention, and then you’ll pay attention to the messages and ideally associate positive feelings with the brand.

But does it work?

That’s a tricky question, you see. If you want to see academic research that shows sexy ads to be ineffective, I can provide it. If, however, you’d like to see some data that supports your decision to use sex in your ads, I can show you that, too.

I teach an entire class on sex and violence in the media, and we spend a lot of time trying to figure this out.

The confusion isn’t with the sex. The confusion is with the question that you ask.

You are, after all, a complicated human being and not an automaton.

Although I can tell you that part of your brain likes sex in ads, that does not tell the entire story.

The average man and the average woman have very different ideas about sex. If you look at the work of evolutionary psychologists, they’ll tell you good reasons for this.

For most of our evolutionary history, there were no courts or child support. Thus, for the average man, sex carried relatively little risk. Basically, the man was out a few hundred calories worth of biological material.

The story was different for a woman, however. An errant sexual encounter led to a 14-year commitment.

Thus from the perspective of gene propagation, women needed to be choosy and find a mate who was going to invest in the offspring. Resources were key.

Men, however, had a different strategy. Quantity was most advantageous. If 20 different women were left to raise your offspring alone, surely some of them would survive.

Now, I’ve read a lot of books on evolutionary psychology, but I wasn’t actually around on the Savannah. So I’m not sure these “just so” stories are true.

But they sure fit with our stereotypes of promiscuous, womanizing men. They also fit with the stereotypes of women being interested in a man’s time commitment, resources, and attention.

And apparently they do a good job explaining our responses to sex in advertising.

Women preferred a sexually explicit watch ad when the watch was wrapped in a bow and described as a gift, according to a study in an upcoming issue of The Journal of Consumer Research, according to The New York Times.

That gift business actually hampered men’s enjoyment of the otherwise sexual ads.

Nothing like the idea of commitment messing up some perfectly good sex, eh guys?

Man, we’re the weak half of the species.

Dismaying as the data are, I look forward to reading the actual study. Well-designed experiments such as these give proper credit to the complexity of human cognition and appeal to more mature disciplines, such as biology and psychology.

Sometimes sex works in an ad. Sometimes it fails. But it always compels attention. Your target market likely dictates whether that attention is good or bad.

If your target market is narrow, then you don’t have to worry about these individual differences. But in every case, you need to know.

Sex does sell. To some of the people, some of the time. And just because everyone is tuned to pay attention to sex doesn’t excuse marketers and advertisers from the hard work of knowing their consumers.

Photo Credit: iStockPhoto.com, 123foto.

That’s what the data say. Now I’m curious to know what you think about sex in advertising. What do you say?