Advertising question

Explain how representations in adverts are constructed to promote the product. Choose two of the adverts that you have studied.

Many major industries and companies create print, radio or TV adverts to try and broadcast their products to a wide audience, and hence entice the consumers to purchase their product. Usually, the adverts are designed to emphasise the quality of the products, with its positives being clearly highlighted to the audience. Companies use different representations to portray their products in a specific way. The idea behind the representations is that it promotes the product in a positive way.

To begin with, Shelter produced a number of print adverts that entail an emotive sentence with the purpose to make the intended audience feel pity. Behind the words there is a picture of a poverty stricken person’s face, each with a sorrowful and dejected facial pose. This is done to emphasise the audience’s feeling of pity towards the homeless, as they can clearly see and understand how depressed homeless people feel due to their sad facial expressions. Shelter themselves are a charity based organisation who raise funds in order to support and help homeless people to get off the street and move into somewhere where they are safe and have a roof over their heads. The intention of their advert is to persuade the audience to donate to the cause as they will feel the need to help the poor, innocent and helpless people that the charity work day and night to support. In all of their printed adverts, shelter state a problem that a homeless person might encounter and then proceed to respond to it by saying ‘we can help’. This gives the impression to the audience that homeless people require the support of the charity, Shelter, and it therefore persuades them to donate and pledge their money to this seemingly worthy cause. Overall, the representations employed by the charity shelter are that of homeless being helpless and in desperate need of support, in order to entice the audience to donate their own money to help in their cause.

The other company, Old Spice, produce predominantly male grooming products ever since the early to mid 20^th Century. Due to them being male gender based, their adverts have tended to focus on their product helping the male gender to gain ‘manliness’. Their male advert includes the esteemed male model, Isaiah Mustafa, with his figure being employed to impress a female audience and to create envy amongst a male audience. This allows for their product to be seen in a positive way, as it is believed that using it will make you look like Isaiah Mustafa. Old Spice use the catchphrase ‘smell like a man, man’ indicating that their product will make you smell more like a man and hence be more attractive.