A level media - Advertising and Marketing

• Advertising as a media form

  • Logos/branding, celebrities, narration, bright lighting, use of colour to create mood, aesthetics that match the brand identity, demonstration of a product, action that represents the product's function
• AIDA


  Attention, Interest, Desire, Action - A model describing the process by which sales people can attract the interests of audiences
• Symbolism


  Symbolic imagery (e.g. fruit used to symbolise natural ingredients in a shampoo ad) often used to represent a product's qualities
• Semiotics


  Symbolic imagery often used to represent a product's qualities - perfume adverts are a prime example of this because you can't broadcast a smell to an audience
• The fundamental function of all adverts is to sell products
• When analysing media language and representation in adverts, the commercial nature of the text is crucial
• Imagery that showed a luxurious and perfect life that you could have if you bought the advertised product used to be common, but contemporary advertisements often rely upon humour or relatability to target audiences
• Advertisers rely on presenting a perfect life that you can have if you buy their product and they do this through the power of repeated patterns of representation
• Advertisements rely upon showing audiences a pathway to a better life through buying products to improve their life
• Adverts tend to focus on issues of personal life instead of political or social issues
• Stereotypes or stereotypical traits have been common in adverts over history and still appear today
• Gendered products


  • Women's shower gel - brightly coloured bottles, fruit/flower scented, and called something like 'Spring Meadow Refreshment'
  • Men's shower gel - grey/black bottles, product names like 'Stealth Action POWERGEL'
• These attitudes towards stereotypes appear in both the products and the adverts themselves
• Score - Young heterosexual men of the period are likely to have taken a preferred reading - they can identify with the strong male adventurer and enjoy the 'comedic' situation in which young women immediately become attracted to him
• Young women of the period might have taken a negotiated reading - the advert objectifies women, but this patriarchal representation was widely accepted as natural and inevitable in the 1960s
• Contemporary audiences (male and female) are likely to take more of an oppositional reading - the advert relies on outdated stereotypes and is unbalanced in the way it sexualises one gender over the other
• Slogan


  'Get what you've always wanted' uses direct audience address to anchor the imagery and target a specific audience of heterosexual men - it was common for advertisements to actively speak to their audience
• Dress codes


  • The models wear traditional beige explorer attire. The women's clothes are ripped and tied in a way that exposes more flesh. Their outfits are constructed for the visual pleasure of a male audience
• Gesture codes


  • The man's hands are clasped in a way that accentuates his forearms. Furthermore, his casual pose implies that he is able to attract women effortlessly because he uses Score hair cream
• Typography


  • Generic sans-serif font signifying the era - in modern print advertising, a range of more elaborate fonts is used to attract audience attention
• Mise en scène


  • The male model is framed by multiple women either side of him connotes his power and influence over the women
• Alliteration


  • 'great grooming' - the repeated 'gr' sound invites connotations of animalistic aggression and traditional masculinity
• Copy


  • A body of text explaining the benefits of the product - minimal text compared to print ads of the 1950s
• Images of the product feature on the bottom third of the print ad, but the main focus is on the scenario surrounding the male adventurer - the effect of the product is more important to emphasise than the product itself
• This brand of hair cream is designed for the traditional 'masculine' man
• Men (specifically heterosexual men) are the hunters and gatherers of society - women should be subservient to men
• It is important for young men (the target audience) to look as well-groomed and handsome as the male model
• Proairetic code


  Some of the women are trying to touch the man; others are carrying him- the implication is that they are carrying him towards some kind of ceremony or reward
• Cultural code


  Much of the visual iconography (the costumes, the man's rifle, the tropical leaves, etc.) appears to reference classic adventure films set in the jungle
• Semantic code


  The image of the man being worshipped as the provider for his 'tribe' could signify a more general scenario in which men are rewarded with sexual gratification for being well groomed
• Symbolic code


  Binary opposites are established between the strong male and the sexually objectified females, who enable his dominance
• LGBTQ rights - homosexual acts were decriminalised in the United Kingdom. At this point, Illinois was the only US state to have enacted the same law
• Women's rights - the ad was released in the early years of the women's liberation movement
• The women in this advertisement are still being sexualised through their appearance, poses and revealing clothing (made to be 'spectacle' instead of characters) to appeal to a male audience. This correlates with the social norms and hegemonic attitudes towards women of the 1960s
• The depiction of femininity is EUROCENTRIC: this term means a bias towards European appearance traits, e.g. white/olive skin, European facial features, straight hair. This is unsurprising for an advert released in the 1950s a time of racial segregation and prejudice in America and other Western societies
• Due to the increasing popularity of television, print ads were no longer the primary form of marketing they had been in the 1950s
• Print ads began to use photography rather than illustration- throughout the 1960s, print ads began to adopt the realistic aesthetic of television
• Unlike newspapers, magazines experienced a decline in advertising revenue
• The 1960s is recognised as a time of 'creative revolution' in advertising
• The 1960s is recognised as a time of 'creative revolution' in the advertising industry - there was more experimentation with humour, irony and image-led content