We are going to do a review of 2 jackets: The Assos windbloc and the GoLite Kinetic. For the review we are shooting photos of the various fabric panels and the fit, the various technical features, etc.

Now, here's the question- and please don't take offense- this is a straight business question and I am asking stright business advice:

We can use an attractive female to model the jackets in the article. WE have three in mind- one is an athlete and looks like an athlete. The other two are just attractive females but not athletes.

Our web numbers from an experiement we did last year proved that if we put an attractive female in the aritcle it WILL get more hits and more traffic. More traffic means better play on the web. That may mean higher search results on Google. That may mean better sales.

The down side is we take the heat for running a photo of an attractive female for exactly the above reasons.

-OR-

Do we just put the jackets on Mike Aderhold and shoot it that way. Totally straight- no cute girl to make the page stickier.

Remember- the last time we put up a "girlie" photo with a model in tri clothes literally thousands of people clicked on it and the clothing sold out in four weeks at full retail- none had to go to off price. but at the same time we got about a dozen e-mails saying "That is in poor taste- that is inappropriate.... blah blah."

So, new Slowtwitch/Bikesport advisory board: What do we do? I need an answer by Tuesday.

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Tom Demerly
The Tri Shop.com