Forget cleavage, photos of women with backbone are what sells

Want to sell something? Use a picture of a woman. Make sure she's white with long straight hair, pouty lips, generous curves and perky, exposed breasts (but don't show the nipple). Add eye contact and a car. This also works for drawing attention to a newspaper article, attracting movie audiences by way of a poster and on packaging.

In fact, for a long time, advertising, marketing and the media have relied heavily on the half-naked-woman-to-eyeball-capture ratio for their sales. ''Nothing risqué, nothing gained," wrote the New Yorker magazine columnist Alexander Woollcott, and he was right.

Until now. Times are a-changin'.

In 2015, when Rupert Murdoch made the decision to drop the Sun newspaper's topless page 3 model pictures, he tweeted that he thought the daily diet of topless pictures was "old-fashioned". His thoughts were at least cognizant of a changing tide in gender politics, even if they weren't exactly prescient.

The way that women are presented in the media is evolving and that evolution can be seen in the selection of images from stock photo libraries such as Getty.

According to an article in the New York Times, the top-selling image in 2007 for the search term "woman" in Getty Image's library of stock photography was of a naked woman lying on a bed, looking into the lens, with a towel draped over her bottom half. '

This year, the most popular image is of a woman hiking a rocky trail, alone on the edge of a cliff high above a blue lake. She's fully dressed, and her face isn't visible.

"It really feels like an image about power, about freedom, about trusting oneself," says the director of visual trends at Getty Images, Pam Grossman. "Who cares what you even look like? Let's focus on what you're doing."

When customers are searching for an image from stock photo agencies, what comes up is determined by popularity as well as curation, and the trend in the past few years has been away from the stereotypical sex-object pictures towards images of women who are sweaty, dirty and active.

At Getty, they've given the trend a name: gritty woman - "images of women literally having dirt on them and not caring, of being powerful and strong", says Grossman in the article.

In fact, this year, Britain's advertising regulator banned ads that promote gender stereotypes and unhealthy body images or that sexually objectify women, in the hopes that society will evolve away from these conventions.

And maybe it's working. In 2015 model and America's Got Talent judge Heidi Klum, whose over-the-top Halloween costumes have always received widespread attention, dressed up as sexpot Jessica Rabbit complete with triple-D chest, bee-sting lips and enlarged ass.

This year she went as a werewolf.

Perhaps we're going too far.