More4: The big tease reveals beauty and brains

Trails using the imagery of the sex industry have been a masterful combination of double entendre and eye-catching promotion for new 'grown-up' channel More4. Ian Burrell reports

"New Adult Entertainment from 4" has been the nightly promise of a long-running series of trails, with the words throbbing in the kind of bright pink neon that you might have expected to see on the outside of Raymond's Revue Bar.

Dash it all, those pornmongers at Horseferry Road have even employed the legendary XXX film star Ron Jeremy to appear in a series of poster and trail ads, arriving to fix women's TV sets with his "big tool".

But the nation's moral watchdogs can relax. The campaign will be revealed today to have been nothing more than a big tease. The new channel offering "adult" telly is not, after all, obsessed with rumpy-pumpy; it's about programming for grown-ups - a bit like BBC4 but more fun.

More4, the latest addition to C4's "family of channels" will launch next month with a line-up of talent that includes Jamie Oliver, Jon Snow, Kevin McCloud, Morgan Spurlock, Hardeep Singh Kohli, Kirstie Allsopp and Sarah Smith. These are the faces revealed today in 96-sheet "manifesto" posters, showing Singh Kohli in his bright turban and skull-and-crossbones sporran, Snow in mufti with tie loosened, and Spurlock (the star of the hit McDonald's-bashing film Super Size Me, who will have his own season on More4) high-kicking over the channel logo.

One of the most elaborate channel launches of recent years, it was dreamed up by advertising agency DDB and overseen by Polly Cochrane, C4's head of marketing, and Rufus Radcliffe, head of marketing for digital channels E4 and More4.

To Cochrane, the appeal of the campaign was that the racy double entendre was something she feels the BBC would never have dared sanction. "Would the BBC ever launch a channel in this way?" she asks rhetorically. "I thought: 'No, it seems a very Channel 4 thing to do.' It might also generate some heat which is only a good thing."

Embracing the risqué concept of "adult entertainment" has, she says, "absolutely no shame in it", complaining that the term has been "colonised by the sex industry". More4 wants to be seen as more intellectually challenging than its more youthful stablemate, E4, but the naughtiness of Ron Jeremy and Co will help to differentiate the new channel from potential rival BBC4, which is already pitched at a highbrow audience. Cochrane cruelly claims that BBC4 has become "very turgid" and that viewers have come to expect "some old man talking about Tolstoy... with subtitles".

She then quickly amends her comment to say: "That's not to say we don't want to be catering for intelligent minds."

All the agencies that pitched for the More4 account were aware that the "territory" was a campaign about "grown-up telly", says Cochrane. DDB came up with the winning idea the night before the pitch and promptly ripped up its previous proposal. Cochrane says: "We really liked it because it was incredibly clear and immediate."

As part of the launch, five million More4 magazines will be delivered inside Sunday newspapers (not the red tops, mind), clad in a black wrapper saucily "warning" of the "adult" nature of the contents inside. The Mail on Sunday has refused to accept the wrappings, taking the view that Middle England would not appreciate the gag.

"It's a way of getting people's attention," says Cochrane of the three-week period between the sleazy promises of adult entertainment and the revelation of the actual content. "You establish it and then you move away from it."

Ron Jeremy "appears" in six-sheet posters, where savvy punters can look through a peep-hole and see a specially made (non-pornographic) clip of the man himself promoting More4 as a TV repairman visiting lonely housewives. The clip, which is also being shown as a TV trail, can be downloaded to Bluetooth compatible phones.

The manifesto shot, with the More4 talent all in a line, is comprised of a series of portraits taken individually by the same photographer (Jim Fiscus). It recalls the promotional posters for Channel 4's hit Paul Abbott drama Shameless, though Cochrane says she does not really expect the public to make that connection.

"This is an interesting, diverse crowd of intelligent people with opinions, a collection of strong individuals, communicating a sense of the programming mix," she says. "The fact that we've secured Martin Sheen and the cast of The West Wing is quite a feat. You don't often see them in bespoke promotion."

Cochrane has looked at the branding of the respective channel portfolios of the BBC and ITV and regards them as "rather bland and corporate" alongside the distinctive logos of the 4 family.

The new channel is aimed at people who grew up with Channel 4 in the Eighties and still like its "rebellious and provocative" spirit, but are now a generation older. Prior to the launch of the marketing campaign on 12 September, More4 announced itself to the television industry at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. The revelation that there would be a forthcoming dramatisation of David Blunkett's affair with publisher Kimberly Fortier (and that Blunkers was deeply unhappy at the prospect) generated many newspaper column inches.

This week Labour Party conference delegates in Brighton will be greeted with More4 posters on bus stops, promoting the programme with an image of a Labrador covering its eyes in shame.

The former home secretary will be even less pleased to discover that he will be the subject of More 4's newspaper advertising campaign when the channel launches on 10 October.