If you've ever envisioned a European beach in summer, images of sexy, sleek and slender Euro bodies will come to mind. That is, if you believe the images in ads for French perfumes, Italian fashion and German cars running in the United States.


But you will be thunderstruck to learn that there's a whale in the surf.

You see, Europeans, smug lot that we are, used to snicker at America's ongoing battle of the bulge, never dreaming that obesity would one day raise its chubby cheeks on this side of the Atlantic.

But raise them it has. Across Europe, as many as 25 percent of women and 20 percent of men are classified as obese. This compares favorably with the 33 percent of adult Americans who are obese, but that's hardly worth bragging about.

Okay, so our designer wardrobes are feeling increasingly pinched and growing numbers of us can no longer make direct eye contact with our toes. What's that got to do with advertising? As it turns out -- plenty.

In keeping with Europe's historic standing as the world's leading center for fashion and design, European companies have traditionally emphasized physical glamour and sexiness in their advertising. Advertisers in every other region of the free world do the same, but none perhaps have felt such intense cultural pressure to associate themselves with classic good looks and beautifully sculpted bodies.

However, the rising prevalence within our union of multiple chins, ballooning waistlines and sagging derrieres is beginning to affect boardroom attitudes. Advertisers are not in the business of promoting any particular societal viewpoint or cultural esthetic. Their goal is to generate positive awareness of their brands and sell as much product as possible.

Although they occasionally submit to being restricted by traditional consumer expectations, their nature is to seize every opportunity to break out and differentiate themselves from the pack.

A current French television ad for Mayonnaise Benedicta illustrates this. It portrays a thief who pauses in the act of stealing the wheels off a parked car to snack on the vegetables and dip he finds inside. The French frequently depict their thieves as exhibiting a certain elegance and physical attractiveness, but this character breaks the mold. He's not suave; he's incredibly big and fat.

Similarly, DHL Courier Service ran a spot across Europe last year featuring two fleshy old men bathing in a lake. And, two years ago, in another pan-European execution, Adecco, the employment services company, portrayed a corpulent boss doing a strip tease on his desk in front of a job applicant.

A number of advertisers in recent years have, in fact, used physical unattractiveness as a central idea of their ads. Diesel created a print and Internet campaign in 2000 about a fictitious Florida fashion photographer, Frank P. Stevenson, who looked like he'd been dragged out of a southern bayou. Tele2, the European phone company, just ran a TV campaign featuring a decidedly uncomely male suitor.

These and other examples point to the same conclusion: There is at the very least a trend underway in European advertising toward casting heavyset actors in roles that previously would have gone -- without a moment's hesitation -- to people with perfect physical proportions.

Interestingly, in the process of breaking through the obesity barrier, marketers seem to have concluded that a related advertising taboo --general physical unattractiveness -- has also become permissible. Heck, it's not only become permissible. It's become desirable.

For one thing, since the advertisers continue for the most part to emphasize physical beauty, the introduction of the merely ordinary -- much less the downright ugly -- is bound to draw attention.

There could be another factor at work here, as well. Euro advertisers may well have stumbled collectively onto an insight about how people watch programming that academics are only now beginning to research. The Journal of Applied Psychology reported recently on a scientific study conducted at Iowa State University that showed television viewers were 67 percent more likely to recall ads that appeared in boring shows than in shows that were sexy or violent.

Part of the reason for this, the scientists theorize, is that sexy and violent programs promote sexy and violent daydreams when the viewer is supposed to be paying attention to the messages in the ads. Obviously, advertising that places a heavy emphasis on sex could similarly misdirect consumers' thoughts.

Further research will have to be done to validate the study's findings before scientists can declare emphatically that sex doesn't sell. Yeah, right. Let them conclude what they like. Personally, I've seen sex sell far too many times to believe the contrary.

But at the very least, this research suggests there is a sound basis for the use actors of average -- better yet, below average -- physical attractiveness in ads. After all, the less viewer daydreaming, the better.