Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from November, 2016

Stereotypes: Do Advertisers have a moral duty to avoid stereotyping people?

In my opinion, the answer to this question is quite complicated. In short, I believe advertisements should be held by a higher moral standard, and we should be more wary of them in general. But advertisers aren't people. They are companies, with numerous people in them, with the companies goal being to generate as much profit as they can. Can we honestly fault advertising companies for making decisions (legal ones that is) that give them the most profit? If we want advertisers to be held to a higher standard, I think that we have to develop higher standards first. When companies perpetrate stereotypes, people should take a stand, via actions such as boycotts, if it is that important to them. Consumers as a group can hold impressive amounts of power over companies (assuming they are not monopolies), if they work together, as at the end of the day, companies want to make profit, and consumers purchasing their product is how they do it. There's a phrase I've heard before call

Print Advertisement: Nivea Moisturizer

To start off, here's some basic information about the advert. Its target audience is young women, as the main focus of the advert is a young woman, and the product is cosmetic, a product type commonly advertised to this target audience. The cosmetic in question is "Nivea Smooth Milk: Body", a type of moisturizing cream. As the ad is written in English and comes from a German (Western) company, it can be concluded that this advert comes from a Western cultural background. Since Nivea was founded in 1911, it can be inferred that this ad was made in 2011, due to the quote "100 years skin care for life". The ad seems to imply that physical attractiveness is the most important factor in a happy relationship, due to the happy couple featured in the image, and the slogan "For visibily smooth and touchably soft skin" (misspellings came with the ad), which seems to imply to the viewer that moisturizer brought the couple closer together (the image has the

Advertising Pitch Reflection

Abel, Ricardo, and I worked in a group (Plus Advertising) assigned to create an advertising pitch for In-tents Camping 's Glamping Trip in Oregon, USA. After some brainstorming, we decided that the focus of the ad shouldn't be on getting people to like going outdoors, but rather on proving that glamping is better than camping. Since most adults who go camping tend to be more 'outdoorsy' people, they would mostly likely not prefer glamping over camping (because they don't mind the discomforts that can come with camping). In our opinion, the target audience that we'd be most successful in was adults with families, as the children of the families would want the comfort that comes with glamping over camping. We felt that our main job was not to get people to be more outdoorsy and go for glamping, but rather prove that glamping is better than camping, and poach some of the regular camping market to add to the glamping market.This led to our choice of appeals. We w

Analysing Rhetoric in an Advertisement

The intended audience of this ad are potential customers for trucks, as the ad emphasizes Volvo's "Volvo Dynamic Steering". By having famed action-star Jean-Claude van Damme preform a split in between two Volvo trucks fitted with dynamic steering, the advert uses both ethos and logos. By having Van Damme, a celebrity famed for similar stunts, they are giving a bit of sincerity and credibility to their advert, as people trust in Van Damme and will more willing to trust the ad as a result, fulfilling the ethos requirement. Van Damme also has a monologue where he details his life, adding to the ethos factor of the ad. To appeal to logos, the ad states that the stunt was set up to test the "stability and precision of Volvo Dynamic Steering", and as the test went on successfully, the viewer therefore concludes that the dynamic steering must be quite good, in order to have been able to achieve that stunt. To appeal to pathos, the ad has Van Damme doing a precarious