Imported from Detroit

Being from Windsor (Canada's automotive capital), I have always had a soft spot for this ad. Several members of my family work for Chrysler and Windsor was hit pretty hard by the domestic automotive industry crash in 2008. And that's what frames these ads: A very public, industry-wide bankruptcy of domestic car companies.

People's confidence in domestic car companies was shattered; years of inept management, shoddy craftsmanship, as well as a union of workers who were publicly perceived as being greedy. This ad was not about advertising 0% financing, or a sale, it was about advertising Detroit, and by that extension, domestically made cars in general. It can even be argued that this is ad which seeks to romanticize American manufacturing in general.

The ad begins by panning around industrial shots of Detroit and showing it's Gothic architecture. A famous mural is shown of industrial laborers working on an assembly line. It's cold outside, and the narrator speaks in a gruff, strong tone. But as the ad continues, things change. The narrator mentions that you shouldn't believe everything you read in the papers about Detroit. At this point the shot of Football players jogging in the snow changes to a figure skater, followed by shots of a shiny new car driving by a music hall displaying only a sign saying "Keep Detroit Beautiful". The music tempo changes from frightening opera music to empowering rap music. This is an ad about rebirth.

This ad came out in 2011 and tells a story about the fall of Detroit, while alluding to its inevitable pheonix-like return to flame from ashes (and as the narrator points out ' its the hottest flames make the hardest steel'). It seeks to showcase the heritage of Detroit and tell the audience that where you're from is equally important as where you are. And that's what Chrysler has over its foreign competitors, a well-recognized history. People have worked in manufacturing for generations in Detroit, and in Detroit "this is what we do".

The emotional appeal of this ad is off the charts. Many audiences members get goose-bumps seeing the run down buildings of Detroit and hearing the narrator ask "What does a city that's been to hell and back know about luxury?". The ad triggers a strong emotional reaction that makes the audience feel the grit and toughness of the city of Detroit. This grit and toughness is then transferred to Chrysler itself, making the audience think that somehow grittiness will somehow solve bankruptcy.


Oh, and notable Detroit-born, rap superstar Eminem delivers that last line in the ad too, which is a fantastic finishing touch.

Using Self-awareness to Identify with Hipsters

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 Advertising

This advertising campaign is aimed at hipsters and uses self-awareness to identify themselves with their target demographic. The ad features a man who has many characteristics of a hipster (he is wearing plaid, wears glasses, has a comb over, wears a V-neck shirt) meeting with a therapist to discuss his problems with Internet Explorer.

 Self-awareness and the ability to poke fun at yourself is one of the core elements of hipsterdom. Self awareness allows one to look at one's own faults from an outside point of view and enjoy in the entertainment of making fun of yourself. In this way Hipsters enjoy the 'irony' in being self-aware of how uncool they are. According to Barthes, we are all stereotypes, and a hipster's ability to at least recognize one's own culture is an element of self-awareness. In this Internet Explorer ad , the company attempts to do just this. Internet Explorer actually distances itself from it's former products by having the commercial's protagonist be an internet explorer hater. However, the new IE9 is "actually pretty good" he says at the end. It's like Microsoft is saying "We know our products used to suck". Notice even how at the end of the ad, the product isn't even called Internet Explorer, it's now 'IE9'.

Here, the goal of the ad is to capture market share from competitors by hoping that people who left internet explorer to go to Chrome or some superior product will now come back, or at least hate it less. It's identifying with it's staunchest opponents by interpolating your distaste for Internet Explorer. As if it's saying "Hey, you seem like a person who hates internet explorer, well here's you in the ad". Once the viewer has accepted the fact that the ad has admitted to creating faulty products, it's requests to try it's new products become more credible.

Second IE ad

The stereotype that hipsters drink PBR is probably one of the most well known clichés about hipster culture. In fact, it's now so cliché that hipsters reject it as being 'too mainstream'. The reason that Hipsters began drinking PBR was because it was ironic; it was a beer originally marketed marketed towards blue collar workers in the Midwest. Internet Explorer attempts to piggyback some of the success of PBR by using the similarities between IT and PBR; that they both are/were thought of as uncool or rustic.

It's almost saying that you should use Internet Explorer ironically, as no one uses it any more because it's so lame. Even in the television commercial, notice how the son's mom is using Internet Explorer to update her blog on "Gluten-free Gingerbread". Internet Explorer is purposefully displaying how uncool it is. Hipsters are all about rejecting mainstream and doing things that no one else does, Internet Explorer uses this opportunity to market to hipsters by basically saying to use their product ironically. 

Ad for Urban Eatery

This ad is pretty risky as it pokes a lot fun at Hipsters. The ad is hoping though, that the hipsters self-awareness will allow them to laugh at themselves by identifying with the description that the chalkboard gives. The restaurant clearly does advertise to hipsters in that it sells "fresh ingredients from local farms" and then repeatedly insults hipster culture in a somewhat condescending fashion. Hipsters are also very self-important, so perhaps the description of Hipster will being in the consumer through their own ego. After all, people love being told about themselves. This ad gambles that the viewer will stick around to read the whole ad (it is way longer than 8 words and contains no pictures) mainly because self-important people want to know what labels they fit in to.

 Perhaps though the ad is so dead-on in it's depiction of what a hipster should be like, that it is using interpolation to prime people into thinking that if they eat at Urban Eatery they will be like the person described in the ad. It appeals to the theory that we buy our identity through our commodity culture. And that if we eat at 'Urban Eatery' (notice event the hipness in the name) we will be the cool, vaguely disinterested hipster described in the ad.

All the ads targeting hipsters perform subgroup hails by focusing on the 'look' and habits of hipsters. The ads  then focus on a self-awareness to bring down the hipsters skepticism and force-fields to traditional advertisements.

B3: 1992: Commander in Chief v.s For People, For Change

Looking through the election summaries from 1952-2012 on http://www.livingroomcandidate.org it is interesting to note that any given election year is defined by a core issue. The issues that the election rides on depend on the current circumstances of the U.S.A. If there has been a recent economic crisis, the focus of the campaign will be the economy. If there is a war overseas, the focus shifts to foreign policy and strength.

In 1992, Bill Clinton steered the focus of the campaign to the economy, and a balanced budget. Many people from the era will remember the internal mantra of the Clinton campaign as being "It's the economy, stupid". This effort was further ameliorated by the independent Ross Perot also focusing on the dangers of supply-side economics and running a deficit.

On paper, Bush had some incredible strong advantages: He was Ronald Reagan's vice-president (one of the Unites States' most popular Presidents of all-time), he has just defeated to the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and had emerged victorious from the very successful Operation Desert Storm. The one large crack in the administration, however, was the faltering economy and Clinton framed his campaign successfully to make people focus on that failure.

Bill Clinton's ads focused on bringing in new voters. In 1992, the Democrats hadn't won an election since 1976 and therefore needed to bring in voters who had voted for the Republicans in 1980, 1984, and 1988. Clinton does this by advertising himself as a "new kind of democrat", as in the Leaders 2 video. In this ad, Clinton is mentioned as being "against welfare as we know it" and "supporting the death penalty", both of these concepts are traditionally seen as being right-wing attitudes, and Clinton highlights his own right-wing tendencies to attract these voters.

The demographic that Clinton targets is the middle class. Bill Clinton's ads cast him as being an American everyman, he does this by denoting his lower-income roots, video shots of himself with his sleeves rolled up, and showing off his rural supporters. Themes of honesty, work-ethic, and cautious budgeting are connoted from his denotations.

Clinton then juxtaposes these themes by showing why George Bush is dishonest, out of touch, and financially incompetent. In Clinton's ad 'Maine', is a 30 second ad that manages to indirectly hit 3 separate attacks on Bush.

1. Firstly, it denotes him playing golf and boating in Maine.The connotation is that George Bush is high-society member who boats and golfs in New England. Also, it connotes that he is not working hard, and spends a lot of time performing leisurely activities.
2. Secondly, the ad denotes George Bush's home, which is huge and on the water. What is connoted here once again is that George bush isn't like the average American, and is so removed from the middle class that he has no idea what issues they are facing. 
3. Thirdly, the ad denotes how George Bush avoids paying taxes by listing his home as being in Texas. What is connoted is that he is dishonest and avoids paying his taxes. The ad then brilliantly ends by pointing out that when people like George Bush avoid paying additional taxes, the burden falls on the middle class.

The rest of the ads generally denote Clinton's focus on balancing a budget and his past successes in doing so. Clinton created a picture of himself as fighting for the middle class while George Bush as being rich and out of touch. Clinton's ads focus on how Bush's policies hurt the middle class and on the budget failures of supply side economics.
The ads also focus on honesty. Bush had introduced a gasoline tax after pledging "Read my lips, no new taxes" and Clinton hit him hard on that lie. The attacks were amplified by the fact that the gasoline tax had to be passed in order to combat the deficit-creating effects of supply-side economics. Other ads, like 'Scary' show how Bush's ads are misleading and lying.

B2: Yogurt--Not That Sexist, but Still Kind of a Liar

FACT: Nearly 75% of the United States' 15-20 million Yoga practitioners are female. Of those practitioners, as astonishing 71% had an undergraduate degree and 44% of yogis have household incomes of $75,000 or more; 24% have more than $100,000. These figures are vastly higher than the rest of the U.S population average.

What does this tell you? The type of people who pursue yoga are generally successful women with a lot of spending power. The type of people who's lifestyle you would like to tie yourself to if you were a consumer product.

More Importantly, spending on yoga related products is on the rise, and has nearly doubled since 2008--while the number of practioners has remained the same. Companies like Lulu Lemon take advantage of this by selling millions of pairs of yoga pants for outrageous prices. However, that makes sense within the context of 'Yoga', after all Lulu Lemon makes 'Yoga enhancing products'.

But what about products that have nothing to do with actually performing yoga?

Yogurt Companies:

What yogurt companies try and do is equate the health benefits of doing yoga, with the health benefits of yogurt by trying to say that they are equal. This is attempted because 52% of yoga practitioners say that they do yoga to improve their health. Here are two examples:

This ad denotes a yoga master telling his class that you must practice yoga everyday, he then takes out a package of yogurt, eats it and says "yummmmm". The health benefits of yogurt are then explained.

What is connotted is that eating a package of yogurt is as good as doing yoga. This notion is ridiculous, it's almost saying that "if you miss your yoga session, just eat a package of yogurt, you'll be fine!". While the ad doesn't explicitly target women, two of the practitioners in the front row are women, and the only close up is of a woman.

The modality of the ad is increased by the Guru, who is telling the yoga class this. He has a long beard and seems like a very wise yoga-master: he looks like he knows his stuff.

Similarly, this ad denotes a woman trying to do yoga to improve her digestion through painful contortion. Her roommate/partner then walks in, points out that she can get that benefit much easier by just eating yogurt.

What is yogurt trying to do? Yogurt is trying to piggyback on all the health effects of yoga by pointing out the one specific health benefit of yogurt. This ploy is sort of unfair as it uses the modality of yogurt's digestive benefits to equate eating it to performing an exercise; that notion is completely ridiculous. If advertisers really are selling "concepts of normalcy" then considering eating yogurt and doing yoga interchangeable seems like an effective way to get this demographic (women who do yoga) to buy yogurt.

What is good about these commercials is that women are not really objectified in any way. The yoga isn't 'sexy' and the women aren't trying to achieve some idealistic beauty. Quite the opposite, they are doing it to help their digestion. So that's a plus. Because these commercials don't really get into objectification of women as sex objects, it is difficult to point to relevant feminist literature that they would be affected by.

Yogurt commercials are traditional advertisements which try to establish a relationship between yogurt and yoga, but do little to create a sexist fear in women that if they do not eat yogurt they will be fat or ugly and then people won't like them.

B1:Cows Independently Advertise for Chick-fil-A

Chick-Fil-A ads:

Despite their controversial decision as a fast food restaurant to have a stance on gay marriage, Chick-Fil-A is a fabulously (perhaps not the best adjective) successful fast food chain in the Southern United States.

They ran an advertising campaign which focused on having cows advertise for Chick-Fil-A, the reasoning behind it being that the cows wanted people to eat more chickens so that people would no longer consume their flesh in hamburgers. For the cows, the ad campaign is an exercise in self-preservation.

This is the simplest incarnation of this ad campaign, the cows are painting the billboard to tell people to "eat mor chikin" and not to eat burgers because they are "4 loserz".

The feature that is entrenched in this ad is sympathy. We're supposed to feel sympathy for these sentient cows, who, while not being smart enough to know how to spell, are smart enough to know the economic relationship known as a 'substitution'. Where if you are eating 'mor chikin' you are therefore less likely to be hungry for other meats, namely beef.

The feature: If you eat more chicken, these cows won't die.

Cows are cute, and as mammals we feel a stronger sense of empathy towards them than we would other animal kingdoms. This empathy leads to a sense of internal guilt when it comes to eating them. Chick-Fil-A tries to take advantage of this by trying to get people to eat chickens instead; which are ugly, less-human, and less intelligent. The cows here are also personified to add empathy. One is standing on the other's back, writing, trying a comically transparent ad campaign to get people to eat chicken.

To increase the modality of the ad, the scenario is made more realistic through a few features to make the cows seem like they are actually doing this of their own accord. Firstly, the cows are physically removed from the billboard to make it look like they are actually painting it. Second, the paint is running, this is an attempt to add some realism to the fact that cows are not professional printers who would be able to make a perfect billboard.Thirdly, the cows have made several spelling mistakes, we know that cows can't spell, but by adding these mistakes the ad is agreeing with us and saying "yeah, cows are dumb! so dumb they can't spell Chicken!". When in reality, the mere notion of cows understanding a written language is absurd. However, because the ad appeals to this logic that if cows were to spell they would do it poorly, the scenario increases its modality.

By doing all three of these things, Chick-Fil-A lends credibility to this scenario where cows are telling people to shop at Chick-fil-A. The following ad takes it a step further:

This ad features a cow falling off the water tower, mid paint job. The consumer isn't thinking "these cows sure are smart to have learned how to paint and understand market substitutes", they are thinking, "Oh look what these dumb cows have gotten themselves into". It's all about adding realism to the consistent ad campaign, which is that cows are independently telling people to eat chicken. 

Notice as well the placement on a water tower. Who knows if this is even a functioning water tower or just purely a billboard. Chick-fil-A might be speaking to its folksy consumer base which might be more receptive to a water tower--which is a symbol of rural life, similar to a granary. In addition to cultural targetting, Chick-Fil-A advertises to the more rural south, where people may have had an emotional connection to cows on their farm.

Chick-Fil-A does all of this without once mentioning any of their own products in any of the above ads. After all, Chick-Fil-A isn't even advertising, it's the cows doing it. I don't even know exactly what Chick-Fil-A sells by looking at these ads, but I can assume it's chicken. 

The feature: If I eat at Chick-Fil-A these hilarious cows won't be slaughtered to make my hamburger.

What does this say about our society? You don't need to advertise your own products in order to get people to buy them. You can just say why your products are more humane (or, appear to be more humane) than the competition. Chick-fil-A does that by generating feelings of guilt that you will face eating a competitor's hamburger. What this also says about our society is the connotation that eating chickens is more okay than eating cows because they are not as cute and intelligent as cows.

Furthermore, it says that you can advertise your products simply by being funny and making people laugh. Which is an interesting concept when you consider that these ads shown do literally nothing to explain their products.