Analyzing Ads in the Wild

Advertising is everywhere. This is a fact of life we have come to realize and deal with. You can't even watch your favorite shows and movies these days without some form of product placement. But all we do is view them, accept them, and then decide if we care about their product or service or not. So step into my jeep. We shall hold a safari adventure right here in the city as we analyze ads in the wild.

Lounging in the pages of magazines and newspapers is the common print ad. In my household, we don't actually have any newspaper or magazine subscriptions, so it was rough trying to find something that wasn't your run of the mill junk mail coupon clippings. This ad is about Box Tops for education. It is simple in it's design, showing the logo at the top against a vibrant blue backdrop. In the middle are a wide range of brand name products as the centerpiece. Between the logo and this spread of food and snacks are a few tag lines. "the difference 1 can make," with the 1 enclosed in what I assume to be the symbol and point value of some sort that you'd find on the box tops. Below that is "Savings for the whole month of September!" in a black board type font, complete with a dashed line below it. Underneath it all, at the bottom of the ad is some fine print about where you can find box tops, and the General Mills logo. It's a simple ad; not a whole lot going on, but it doesn't need to be. Box Tops for Education is about helping schools get money. It's an innocent cause, and with how comforting the ad is, it gets the point across. The chalk board font feels like you're in a proper classroom, and the spread of General Mills products in the middle show you how common their products are and that you don't need to go out of your way to help a good cause.

Next on our ad safari is the wild television ad. With how much television people watch these days, these are aggressive ads that try to make you pay attention even if you don't care about the ads in between segments of your favorite show. It's a hard world to compete in, so these ads have to try harder. Let's look at a KitKat commercial. It's Halloween and we see some kids in costumes running up to a house to ring the doorbell. Inside we also see a woman preparing her candy bowl. She opens a bag of KitKats and pours it into a bowl. The kids ring the doorbell and yell "Trick or treat!" The woman smiles as she answers the door with a witch hat and we get a close up of KitKats dropped into the kids' waiting candy buckets. Once the door is closed, the kids run off and stop back on the sidewalk and open their new candy bars. Cut back to the woman in the house and she's opening a KitKat of her own. Everyone eats their KitKats and the kids make "Mm!" noises of sweet candy satisfaction. Throughout this commercial, the only things we hear are the kids and the sound effects. KitKats getting dropped into buckets and bowls, the doorbell ringing, wrappers getting torn, and the KitKats breaking. It is all done to the classic KitKat jingle. "Gimme a break, gimme a break! Break me off a piece of that Kit-Kat bar!" The commercial doesn't need the music or the lyrics. They know that people have heard it enough to know the tune just by properly timed sounds. Otherwise the commercial is completely feel good and happy. It's an innocent childhood tradition and we see everyone taking part with a smile as KitKats are enjoyed by both the young and the old. You don't need to be a kid to enjoy a KitKat.

Finally we come to the elusive public ad. These can be found on the sides of bus shelters, billboards, and even on the ceiling of the bus itself. I myself frequent the bus so I see plenty of ads like this on my daily commute. I saw a simple one recently. It had a hazy gray background and a young, sad looking child on it. Beside his head were the words "He can feel your cozy wood fire. In his lungs." It was an add for spare the air day. Something about this ad always strikes me as terrifying. The implications here are rather clear. It's trying to imply that with all the emissions we put into the air--car exhaust, smoking chimneys, etc.--it's like we're making choking people as though everyone's got their head down a chimney. And of course our hearts always go out to sad looking children. "This poor kid can't breathe because of our pollutant ways!" There is a certain amount of shock value in play here, implying that our forms of comfort are hurting small children.

And so ends our safari analysis of ads in the wild. Please watch your step as you leave the jeep and have a nice day. This has been another lesson in selling stuff.