Advertisers use every possible means and techniques to sell all kinds of products, from the cheapest to the most expensive ones, from the most to the least useful. When making an advertisement they make sure that their product will be attractive, desirable, and that it will create the need to purchase it. Among the techniques they use we find glamor, they do not focus only on the products and their use; they try sell a lifestyle and the idea of self improvement. They also sell products which exchange value is higher than their use value using all these techniques. It will be worth trying to shed light on all these techniques and concepts in order to understand the way they are used to make consumers spend their money on specific products, and subsequently apply these concepts to interpret some particular ads.
[...] The same analysis can be done for the second advertisement (appendix 2). While the previous advertisement addresses to young men willing to look like the model, advertisers are using in this one a female model. Here again we see a glamorous and sexy woman. Her look is similar to the male model's look; she is putting her fingers on her mouth and her hear is covering her forehead, the other hand is up, which gives a sexier posture. This advertisement addresses to young women, the message here is that they will look sexy and attractive if they wear this Calvin Klein watch. [...]
[...] An example of this kind of gaze could be a woman looking at a man, and vise versa, a person looking at a car, a house, a ring, a picture, or any other object. In extra-diegetic gaze, the person depicted in the picture looks directly at the spectator and gives a king of power. Now let us analyze some advertisements based on all these different concepts, and using watches as a linking theme. There are different types of watches targeting different types of consumers. [...]
[...] Despite of the difference in the advertising techniques, both advertisements promote the same wealthy lifestyle. It is obvious that the advertising techniques used in our century are different from the ones used in the past. The advertisement in appendix 5 emphasizes this difference. This old advertisement is heavily based on text. As you can see in appendix the name of the brand is accompanied by different slogans. Here we can easily identify two of them: "Accurate to the second" and a "gift that lasts a lifetime". [...]
[...] made of diamond is not vital and people can live easily without having such luxurious jewelry; however the exchange value of a diamond is much higher than the one of water, although the use value of water is higher than the one of diamond. The logic behind aligning the use value with the exchange value is not always evident in commodity cultures where the meanings attached to products are more taken into consideration than their real function. Sturken and Cartwright (2004) argued that in commodity cultures “commodities are central to cultural meaning,” (p.198). [...]
APA Style reference
For your bibliographyOnline reading
with our online readerContent validated
by our reading committee
