Van Heusen advertisement elements

Title: Van Heusen Ties Ad.         

Text type: Visual             

Theme/Subject: ties    

Audience: Men around their 30’s          

Purpose: Persuade the audience to buy ties.                   

Register: Informal          

Author: unknown, but probably a man.              

Note five important techniques that are relevant to the text.  Provide the example of the technique from the text.  Explain the significance of the technique and example in terms of audience, purpose and /or text type.

Element: visual    Technique: Drawing                                                                        

Example: The drawing portrays a women serving a man.

Significance: As the women is on her knees, serving food to the man, she is clearly inferior and follows his orders.

Element: Language                                                 Technique: Alliteration

Example: Power packed patterns

Significance: The alliteration “power packed patterns” is used to refer to the ties. It means that the ties are what give men power over women. The audience will believe that by wearing them, they will be special and be superior to women.

Element: Visual                                                         Technique: Size

Example: The ties are the images with the greatest size.

Significance: The ties have the greatest size in order to advertise the product. Ties are the main focus of the advertisement so they should appear the biggest in the drawing to stay in the audiences mind.

Element: Visual                                                         Technique:  Color

Example: The man is dressed in white so that the tie stands out.

Significance: The tie stands out in the man, so that the audience will believe that if they were ties it is something that everyone will notice. Therefore, they are motivated to buy them.

Element: Language                                                                   Technique: Jokes

Example: The phrase “show her it’s a man’s world” would be funny to men.

Significance: Men will be amused by the joke, so they will take interest in the advertisement and thus learn about the product.

Element: Visual                                                         Technique: Logo

Example: The logo of Van Heusen is the largest text in the advertisement.

Significance: The logo is this big, in order to promote the brand and let the audience know what Van Heusen does.

Axe Advertisement

Reflection on "Killing Us Softly: Avertising's View of Women

In the video they say that advertisements sell more than the product. They transmit values and ideas to the viewers.

 Women are constantly being portrayed as an object. Therefore, it could lead to violence against them.

They also exert pressures, especially on young women to look attractive. They sell us how we should be. However, what is portrayed as beauty is sometimes impossible to achieve because they use photoshop to enhance the look of women. The advertisements are creating a trend on women to become obsessed with their looks and anorexic.

Clearly, advertisements are "killing us softly", due to the values they transmit and the actions they make us take.

Century of Self Reflection

Part 2: Language and Mass-Communication

Unit: Advertising

Text: Documentary: “The Century of Self”—first 30 minutes.

Idea: The world has not always been the way it is now. Psychology, Advertising, Female Rights are all relatively new phenomenona in the Western World.

Focus: How do Freud’s psychological ideas fit into our unit on Advertising?

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Freud believed man harbored “dangerous instinctual drives”, both sexual and violent. His nephew, “Edward Bernays” harnessed his uncle’s ideas to create a mass-consumerism for the first time during the Twentieth Century.

What is the unconscious? Hidden, unwelcome impulses

World War 1 was the logical, inevitable, terrible conclusion of humanity’s and nations’ path towards becoming the greatest, most powerful nation on earth.

America entered the First World War in 1917. Bernays accompanied President Woodrow Wilson to the Versailles Treaty, the peace conference held after the war was over.

They had to sell the war to the American public.

‘”We wanted to make the world a safe democracy. —that was the slogan”, Edward Bernays.

Wilson emerged as a world champion of peace and was adored by the masses in America.

“Propaganda” was a ‘dirty word’ owing to the way in which it had been utilized in a negative sense during wartime.

Bernays realized that the mass acted as one during war time. What if they could do it in peacetime and harness the “irrational desires” of the masses and get them to buy products? Massive profits would ensue.

Cigarettes and the Suffragette Movement: there used to be a taboo on women smoking in public. Smoking was a purely male-preserve in the early-1900s.

The cigarette companies wanted to get 50% of the market smoking. They consulted a psychoanalyst, A.A. Brill,  who stated that cigarettes were symbols of penises (much of Freudian thought has to do with sexual desire, remember!). If they could get women to ‘own’ cigarettes and empower them through

So at a suffragette rally, the days socialites (today’s Paris Hiltons etc.) took out what were labeled “torches of freedom” at one moment. They made them more socially acceptable in a flash.

By linking products to emotional desires and thinking and making seemingly irrelevant links between products and desires, relevant, then you were in business!

Mass production flourished after the War. The War had seen huge increases in production costs.

Most products were advertised as necessities, not as luxuries Advertising then was geared towards displaying a product’s practical virtues.  The rich had always enjoyed luxury products but for the masses, they lived a far more sober life.

They needed the masses to desire the new surplus of products. Look to a desire for the new, even before it is old.  The final stage was to make these new products appeal, not just desirable, but essential: think the fashion industry, the music business, any one of the thousands “New! Improved!” slogans you will see in the shops.

The utilization of celebrity endorsement and, ultimately, in films happened for the first time under the leadership of Bernays. He also financed ‘scientific experiments’ as though they were independent research.

“A change has come over our democracy. It is called ‘Consumptionism. An American’s duty to his country is no longer as citizen but as consumer.” – American Journalist.

Bernays also promoted the idea of credit on a vast scale so that people could consume.

1924: Politics became involved in public relations. 34 Hollywood actors were invited to the White House to change the public’s perception of the presiding President Coolidge, whom they perceived as rather dull.

After losing money in the world financial collapses in the 1930s, Freud was able to market his psychological works in America. His viewpoint of man became more cynical of man as he saw the dangerous potential of the violence locked beneath the surface of man.  Therefore, he thought democracy dangerous as men were violent, so why should they have the right to vote. He suggested it would be better if a stronger group of leaders took control over this potentially dangerous mob. Now then, the techniques that had been used for mass- marketing would be applied to product placement.

If you could satiate the masses’ impulsive desire through the consumption of products, then you would have a better chance of organizing a more peaceful society.

President Hoover was the first to recognize that consumerism could become the central motor of American life.

People were viewed as “ever-moving happiness machines…that would become the key to  economic progress.”

“Democracy at its heart was about changing the relations of power that had governed the world for so long” (30.30).—Stuart Ewen, Historian of Public Relations.

Bernays knew all the politicians/actors/financiers of his day. He was the “Gatsby” of his age!

Seth Godin: “How to Spread Good Ideas.” Reflection

In 2003, Seth Godin’s gave a Ted Talk in Montreal, Canada, entitled, “How to Spread Good Ideas.” Godin’s purpose was to show that in order to sell a product, we not only need to communicate the idea, but also make it remarkable to an audience comprised mainly of early adaptors and innovators.

“We are living in a century of ideas diffusion.”

Some techniques that Godin used to make his talk memorable included the use of repetition of the Word “remarkable”, which allowed the audience to capture this idea very well. Also, he implemented metaphors, by saying that the advertisements “touched people” which created the reaction that they had an effect on the viewers, making them feel they need the products. Finally, the use of anecdotes, gave his speech more credibility and make the viewers feel identified with some of the things he said. For example, when he mentioned that advertisements were interrupting him when he was a child, the same must have happened to some people in the audience. Therefore, they will feel that Godin is stating true facts.

Godin states that the way in which marketing works has changed forever. It used to be that companies would spend $100m “interrupting me.” The reason for this he states is: “Consumers don’t care about you at all. They have too many choices and too little time.” So what you have to do as a company is be remarkable.

Seth Godin’s use of an anecdote with the joke about sliced bread, and the introduction of a purple cow on his Powerpoint screen, formed a strong bond with the audience.

Godin’s delivery included a range of pitches, high, and low. This made his Ted Talk more enthusiastic and interesting for the audience. It created different emotions, for example when he used a low pitch, he created a thoughtful environment for the listeners to reflect about what he had just mentioned.

Body language was a key part of making this Ted Talk a success. He used hand gestures to create images of what he was talking about, and thus draw a clear image in the minds of the listeners.

He closes his speech emphatically by talking about the construction of an immense lava lamp in the middle of town in Soap Lake Washington. He states that the structure would be something remarkable, making him eager to visit the place.