‘Sunsilk’ 1960’s ad
The Sunsilk advert is a retro ad from the 1960’s. The tone of the advert is calm and gentle, this is because of the use of many different techniques such as non-diagetic sound, the melody played in the background -composed by John Barry- is haunting and sets a mysterious atmosphere within the advert. The voice over also ads to this because mans voice is so calm and matter of fact.
The message of the advert is clear Sunsilk will make your hair beautiful therefor making you look more beautiful and the tag line is ‘its part of the art of being beautiful’ implying that Sunsilk should be an essential part of a beauty regime .
The representation of the woman is important in this advert she is simply a beautiful woman with beautiful hair. Because the advert is black and white it is hard to keep the audiences attention on the womans hair but by the way they used personal codes like the clothes she is wearing (light colours) makes her hair more noticeable. However the representation could be perceived wrongly by an audience because in the voice over the man says ‘sunny silky, sunsilk’ and the woman is blonde, in my opinion this could be taken the wrong way and an audience could think the product is just for blonde hair.
I think that the setting used in the advert is completely irrelevant although i know that the directors intentions were probably to make the woman look elegant by rowing a boat. In my opinion they could of used a simpler more relatable environment to set the advert e.g a bathroom/hair dressers.
Product placement was successful in this advert because each bottle is displayed separately at the same time as being mentioned in the voiceover this makes it easy for an audience to recognise the product they are most interested in.
‘Dior Addict’
The overall tone Dior Addict advert is very playful and upbeat there are a number of techniques used to make it appeal to its target audience of young women. The representation of the young woman in the ad is beautiful, skinny and self confident this links into the tagline of the advert ‘be iconic’. However, some people including myself put the message and representation together implying that the message of the advert is that you have to be beautiful, skinny and self confident to be iconic. The woman in the avert is also mysterious and playful this is shown by the use of personal codes such as the black clothing that she is wearing in each shot and the playful way she flicks her hair and twirls around, again this could imply to the audience that you need to be playful and confident to be iconic.
The young woman isn’t the only person in this advert, the other representation is men. All the men in the video are smartly dressed with dark hair (conventions of a stereotypical french male) and swoon over the young woman this is made obvious by looking at personal codes such as there facial expressions and body language. This could also falsely suggest that by wearing this perfume can attract male attention.
The tone of music used on the advert matches the upbeat, playful tone of the advert and i think it is very effective in intriguing people to watch the advert because it is such a fun song. Although it has some bad points within the representations, i find this advert to be successful because personally after watching it i went to the shops and purchased this perfume out of curiosity.
‘Fairy Liquid’ 1960’s ad
In this video there is a very important representation of a mother/housewife we know this by looking at personal codes such as the apron that she wears and her wedding ring. There is another representation of the curious daughter learning from her mother about washing up. Visual codes shows the audience that the mother and daughter have just finished cooking -bowl, spoon and weighing scales-. These are important representations because in the 60’s women were supposed to do all the cooking and cleaning and so would of had to teach there daughters, therefore the advert is relatable.
The references to keeping her hands soft are also important because women are supposed to be elegant, soft people. There is good use of product placement in the advert because the fairy liquid bottle can be seen in the background in some shots, this is a good technique to use when advertising because it embeds the product in the viewers mind without them necessarily realising.
By looking at technical codes i.e the jingle we know that this advert would be effective. This is because it is a catchy jingle and the tone of the score matches that of the advert itself: casual, soft and informative . The purpose of this advert is to persuade its target audience -housewives- to buy fairy liquid and i think, for its time its very effective.
Although this advert would of been relevant in the 60’s, if an advert like this was to be played now it would probably be seen as sexist. This is because over the past 50 years women have become almost equal to men and therefor the majority wouldn’t be seen as stay at home mothers. By comparing this advert to the 2011 fairy advert you can see the representations have changed because we now see a male and female washing up together suggesting equality between man and women, showing the progression of society over the years.
‘It’s 30 for a reason’
The ‘It’s 30 for a reason’ advert by think uses a number of techniques to grab the viewers attention. The ad is informative and the message is clear as the young girl explains that if she’s hit by a car at 40mph there’s an 80 per cent chance she’ll die. If hit at 30mph there’s an 80 per cent chance she’ll live. The representation of the young girl in the advert is very innocent, this is shown by personal codes for example the way she is dressed as a typical child, wearing jeans and a jacket with her hair in plaits this makes the advert relatable to parents and therefore would scare and encourage them to drive slower. They used a young girl as the main role to portray vulnerability and tug on the heart strings of the audience.
The purpose of this advert is to urge people to abide to the speed limit, getting people to change there habits is difficult and thats why informative adverts have to be so hard hitting, this particular advert is so hard hitting because we see the young vulnerable girl is obviously hurt and suffering even though we don’t see the impact with the car visual codes – placement of the girl in the middle of the road, blood from her ear- suggest that she has been hit. The structure is conventional of an informative advert, it is simple and keeps the audience wondering, allowing them to figure out the situation in there own time. Unlike commercial adverts who make there brand noticed from the first second.
the use of non diagetic sounds in the advert are very effective in setting an eery atmosphere for example the cracking of the girls bones as she moves and the background music, in contrast to this the young girls voice is sweet and innocent instantly catching the audiences attention. The editing and special effects used to complete the advert are similar to those used to make a horror scary, again looking at the young girls movement, her bones as they crack into place and the blood from her ear the purpose to scare the audience into keeping to the speed limit.
jodiesays 