!!!!!!!!!!!!!ANALIZE DYLAN MULVANEY BUD LITE AD!!!!!!!
Some thoughts regarding Advertisements:
- Advertisements are a crucial element of contemporary society: surrounding us in our daily lives, influencing our behavior and attitudes, and holding up a sometimes uncannily accurate, sometimes intriguingly distorted mirror of our culture.
- Advertisements encode many of our most crucial values and beliefs.
- Even the simplest and most seemingly direct advertisements still carry subtly powerful messages–about appropriate modes of behavior, standards of beauty and success, gender roles, and a variety of other markers for normalcy and status.
- Advertisements have quite an influence–perhaps all the more so because we think they’re so bland and harmless.
Your Analysis/Thesis: After reading “Chapter 4: Brought To You B(u)y: The Signs of Advertising,” (241-249) and “Reading Visual Images Actively” (28-31), you will analyze any advertisement of your choice. Your analysis will intensely and astutely examine an advertisement of your choice by expressing the advertisement’s “true” purpose or it’s ulterior motive.
- For instance, you found a print advertisement in People Magazine for the newest Apple iPad and chose to analyze it for this essay. Your Thesis and the essay’s overall purpose isn’t to expose that the new iPad is good and will be available in four fashion colors…NO!!!
- Your Thesis and the essay’s overall purpose is to expose that the newest Apple iPad is promoting elitism amongst society and that the new generation of youth (ages 12-18) are being influenced in a negative way where they will only want and desire items that are expensive and fashionable in order to show off; thus, the iPad’s purpose of technology making life easier is lost on this new generation of consumers who are concerned only with artifice and less with substance and purpose.
Of course, this is one way of analyzing and advertisement. The different methods of analyzing an advertisement can encompass but are not limited to:
- Analyzing an advertisement’s influence on or reflection of our Western society’s divisive elitism
- Analyzing ad advertisement’s influence on or reflection of sexism/sexist beliefs
- Analyzing an advertisement’s influence on or reflection of racist beliefs
- Analyzing an advertisement’s influence on or reflection of homophobia
Whichever way you choose to analyze an advertisement, make sure you are not merely summarizing the advertisement’s purpose. You are re-examining the advertisement and seeking the hidden agenda behind the advertisement. What else is it selling? Or, what is it truly selling?
As I read your essay, I look to be enlightened by your unique view of “seeing” an advertisement in a new and different way. What is this advertisement trying to say or what is it insinuating?
How do you arrive at your Thesis? Scrutinize the image(s) carefully:
- Pay attention to specific people or objects in the ad.
- Do they have cultural significance?
- Are there dominant colors?
- Do these colors have cultural significance?
When analyzing images, consider the sections “Developing Strong Arguments about Popular Culture” (p. 24-28) and “Reading Visual Images Actively” (p. 28-31) from the preface of our textbook to help you analyze an image which will help you cultivate your Thesis and shape your analysis throughout the essay.