To help students succeed on their essays, I like to provide them with opportunities to practice the skills they’ll need to use on their assignments. Since this assignment requires you to analyze an ad of your choice, I’d like to first model an ad analysis and then give you a chance to practice analyzing a different ad.
This first ad we’ll look at is a De Beers diamond ring ad aimed at young, educated professional women, encouraging them to buy themselves a diamond ring.\u00a0 Here’s a link to the file. Click on it and study it for a moment before reading further.
diamond ad.jpg\u00a0download
Before we go on to analyze this ad more deeply, I’d like to look back for a moment at an earlier De Beer’s campaign for diamonds, one of the most successful marketing strategies of all time. Read the article embedded here for a look at that campaign, characterized by the slogan, “A Diamond Is Forever.” The ad slogan uses a verbal sleight-of-hand to conflate two things that are actually very different. A diamond has one of the hardest surfaces on earth; it’s so strong that dentists use diamond-tipped drills to buzz through teeth. In that sense, a diamond does last forever. What the ad is promising, though, is that romantic love will last forever if sealed with the gift of a diamond. As a gazillion divorces have testified, however, although a diamond might have been used to symbolize the union, the relationship wasn’t guaranteed to last. In fact, in many cases, the ring quickly outlasted the marital union.
Here is the link to the article entitled, “My Favourite Ad of AllTtime: DeBeers \u2018A Diamond Is Forever\u2019 from 1938 Onwards”https:\/\/www.mumbrella.asia\/2019\/04\/my-favourite-ad-of-all-time-debeers-diamonds-are-forever-from-1938-onwards\u00a0(Links to an external site.)
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Diamonds are now a well-established part of the engagement and wedding ring tradition (and, hey, two rings: that’s twice as many sales), so lots of them get sold. Companies are always looking for ways to move more product, however, so it’s not surprising that De Beer’s would want to encourage women to start buying rings for themselves as well. The copy in the above ad, aimed at young, professional women, looks at the left hand as needing a ring to celebrate romance with a partner, but adds in the idea of the right hand as a space to celebrate one’s own self and value. In doing so, it co-opts feminism and gestures from protest movements, positioning itself as being supportive of women’s rights. The dual-hand emphasis is a way for it to bridge two concepts that might otherwise exist in tension–tradition and revolution.
This campaign also happens against the backdrop of the fact that for the first time in American history, there are more single, than married, people. In fact, in some places, single women have started to celebrate their single status, defiantly refusing to accept the idea that they have less value if they aren’t defined by a relationship.\u00a0
The woman in the ad is beautiful and gazes confidently at the viewer. She looks educated, sophisticated, professional–and she also looks feminine. There are touches, such as the lighting, her long hair, and her soft sweater, that soften her declaration of independence–perhaps to make it more palatable to an audience. Our country still has a double standard when it comes to ambitious women who are sometimes seen as unlikable. That’s likely one reason why she isn’t portrayed as standing up and dominating the viewer. With her arm resting on the furniture and at eye level with the reader, she appears more approachable and less threatening.
Look also at how the ring on her hand shines. It’s like a torch, a guiding light that can direct her out of the darkness. In the end, it seems to me that the ring is driving the forward movement more than the woman herself. In fact, in its extreme brightness, the ring can actually draw attention away from the woman.
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So that’s the kind of thing you’ll be doing in your own essay. You’ll identify the audience of your ad–here it was young, upwardly-mobile, educated professional women–and then you’ll look at the messages that the company is sending to them in order to persuade them to buy their product. The notion of identity is important here. The ad is selling an idealized lifestyle and an idealized image of the self to the consumer. The promise is that those things can be achieved if one just buys the ring, or the beer, or the deodorant, or whatever.
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DIRECTIONS: Now I’d like you to try your hand at analyzing an ad. I’ll post links to two\u00a0 different ones, and you’ll pick the ONE you feel most comfortable writing about. You can start by just observing details of the ad. For example, with the De Beers’ ad, one thing I noticed was that the model wasn’t standing upright. I asked myself why that was and what message it conveyed.
Then start to spin out ideas about what these details\u00a0mean. Advertising is a multi-billion-dollar business. What’s there is there by design. Every detail of the ad is carefully considered and arranged.
In addition, try to pinpoint the specific target audience of the ad. What specific messages is the ad sending to these viewers in order to persuade them to buy the showcased product?
Here are links to the ads:
advertisement men auto Tacoma GQ magazine.jpg\u00a0download <\/p>\n
men auto Toyota Camry Mens Health magazine.jpg\u00a0 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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