ENGL 429: Violence, Shopping, and Sex in the Seventies

Understanding Advertisements

We often instinctively understand television commercials and print advertisement--or so we think. In fact, commercials and advertisements are often polysemic, saturated with multiple messages, ideologies, and values, sometimes even conflicting or contradictory ones. Beneath the surface of every advertisement lurks a host of desires, fantasies, and anxieties. 

For this assignment you will be looking at this collection of print ads from the late sixties and the seventies, culled from magazines like Road and Track, Newsweek, Good Housekeeping, and Time.

Here are some key questions to consider to begin really understanding what is going on in advertisements:

• How does the advertisement create difference between the product advertised and all other products? Why is this particular brand of X better than any other brand of X?
• What sort of values or emotions does the advertised product appeal to? (Modernity, success, independence, freedom, leisure, creativity, health, cleanliness, vitality, sophistication, and so on.)
• What desirable lifestyles does the advertisement attempt to associate with the product offered?
• What sort of anxieties does this product appear to resolve?
• What about the people in the advertisement? Where are they looking? Is their attention directed towards other people, an object, themselves, the reader/camera, or off to the distance?
• Do gender, class, or race dynamics play a role in the advertisement?
• Who is the intended audience? How are they addressed?
• Does the advertisement rely on intertextuality? That is, does it “quote” another text (like a novel, a painting, a scientific work, a classical trope, famous architecture, or even another advertisement)?
• Are there elements which you might expect to find in the advertisement but which are missing? What is absent or avoided in the ad?
• Does the advertisement attempt to turn history into nature? In other words, does the ad "naturalize" something that is in fact social or cultural?

• The print (typeface, layout, stylized text)
• Images (distance, angle, framing)
• The relationship between the words and images