This week in class we learned about the “four master tropes”, a trop is just a word meaning “figure of speech”. This week I picked a simple ad that we’ve all seen before I’m sure, but I think it does a really great job at portraying one of the master tropes which was metaphor.
This simple yet well done commercial is portaying the Chocolate cell phone to be like actual chocolate: sweet and magnificant. The metaphor is obvious, the cell phone is the portaying the chocolate.
I think commercials sometimes say too much, and a commercial like this doesn’t explain many features, or how much it costs, or really anything. It expects the look and the fact that the phone holds music to sell itself.
This week in class we looked at Roy Williams’ Six Tugs of War. This way of analyzing advertisements was easier to understand for me personally than Aristotle’s Casual Analysis techniques. Last week I picked a funny commercial so I’ve decided to go in a different direction this week, although this one is still humorous it seems to have more substance than the Bud Light ad.
I would like to focus on one of the six tugs of advertising for analyzing this commercial: style vs. substance. In the reading Williams explains how he was so successful at selling diamonds, he explains that people are not buying diamonds because they are the hardest substance on earth, but for the reaction of other people. The point is that when building an ad campaign one needs to decide whether to show people benefits of buying a product based on the product or based on other outside benefits: others reactions for instance.
In the lifesavers commercial the advertisement doesn’t focus on the actual product, it focuses on the outside world. Of course skittles isn’t going to make you a sweeter person, but the commercial sure makes you feel good about eating lifesavers. The company could have explained what different flavors are available, how many calories are in each lifesaver, what ingrediants are in it, etc. But they chose a more interesting route, which I think was smart, because nobody would pay much attention to a lifesavers commercial if it was all about substance.
Overall I think this was a really well done advertisement, it is what I call a ‘feel good’ commercial. It makes you smile, it makes you feel good, and happy. The song is also a perfect addition and goes really well with this commercial. Sometimes I think that the song added to a commercial can either make it or break it, and I find it funny how lately I’ve found a lot of good music that I hadn’t heard of before from commercials.
