In school we were required to take a couple advertising classes that were heavy in the history department. History has never been my thing, but at least with advertising history there are old ads to look at. I won't bore you with the really old stuff, but there are some interesting examples from mid last century. I came across an article from BoingBoing about how there is an entire period of time where women were depicted quite poorly in advertisements.
By today's standards these are pretty bad. You just don't do this anymore. I might, however, argue that the woman in the lower left ad is rather enjoying herself. It is interesting to think about how this was socially acceptable at one point. This mentality is depicted very well in the AMC series Mad Men. I was never an avid watcher (debating picking it up now that Lost is over), but the premise of the show was clear: depict life at an ad agency in the 60's. Agencies were male dominated and an intimidating place for women to work. It isn't surprising the work they put out reflected a similar nature.
In Amanda's post she talked about a controversial ad of today in which an ad was overtly sexualized. We see that a lot in today's ads (as such, you'll probably see a lot of it here). This makes me wonder if we will reach a point where it will be socially unacceptable to use overtly sexualized imagery in ads. We stopped objectifying women in ads (okay, I admit, it may just have transformed into the overt sexualization), so I wonder what the next transformation will be. Either way, these classic ads are something else.
This post is short and sweet…. On my way home from work today I saw a billboard that said the following:
Your Wife is Hot!
It's time to fix the A/C
And that was pretty much it plus some contact information. This billboard was awesome. It definitely grabbed my attention and was quite creative. I do feel like I have seen this before, but I can not place it.
Skydiving tomorrow. Yes. I know. What am I thinking?
Okay, I admit, I like the visuals as well. The audio is great though; I wasn’t joking about that. I found this over at the ADFREAK blog and thought their interpretation of what was going on was interesting.
They essentially said that this may be a new type of advertising in which it is essentially product placement, but on a different level. By this I mean Michael Bay has chosen to (agreed to? was paid to?) cast Rosie Huntington-Whitely in the Transformers 3 movie. This is interesting because she has no acting experience, just a lot of looking hot experience (which she does well).
I find it interesting that Victoria’s Secret decided to do a congratulations highlight reel, but as ADFREAK points out it may be to further the product placement. Either way the spot is enjoyable, I will see Transformers 3, and probably continue to buy Victoria’s Secret products for a significant other (#datemattmcnamara).
The other day I asked if PSAs are or were ever effective. I’m still not sure I can answer that, but here is an ad that makes me think a relevant PSA can do good.
Minus the fact that they copied th E*Trade commercials, I think it gets the point across quite well. I think that the use of Palin just ads to the comedic factor. I’m sure this isn’t what they were going for, but it is one of the reason’s I think it might be an effective spot. I do question whether or not the intended target audience will understand the significance of who Bristol Palin is because I do not think they are interested enough in politics to be familiar with her or to see why she would be relevant.
Good spot either way and worth the laugh at the very least. Not that teen pregnancy is a laughing matter. Just want to make that clear.
The other day on my drive home from work I was thinking about a topic rather new to me: dating. I was thinking about how it would be nice if the women came to me, how it would be nice if a girl who was interested in me told me as much.
The advertiser in me started emerging and I was thinking about ways one could make this happen. I thought back to the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall and some of the brilliant ads there were put up to generate buzz. For those of you who don’t know, they put billboards up everywhere with seemingly random lines about this girl named Sarah Marshall. The ads seemed so basic and cheap that my friends and I believed that some guy was taking a shot at his girlfriend publicly. It wasn’t until we started seeing TV ads that it made sense.
But the point there is that the ads generated enough buzz to get people to start talking and go to the website. They forced people to be proactive. The thought
that crossed my mind was to put up a billboard, that essentially was creative enough and yet vague enough to make people want to find out more. It would point them to something like www.DateMattMcNamara.com (I almost bought the domain).
Admittedly, this is crazy. I know that. But I couldn’t help but think about how fun it would be. People put up billboards to get jobs, ask their significant others to marry them, and probably other crazy things. People are dating in all sorts of crazy ways (online dating, speed dating, blind dates, etc), so why can’t I date via billboard?
While it would be fun, I don’t think I have the money to put up a billboard right now (anyone want to sponsor me?). For now I will stick to the traditional methods; whatever those are.
Photo Credits:
Sarah Marshall Billboard by: aemoreira042281
Original Blank Billboard by: mediaboytodd
Both photos licensed under CC
