Consumers

We are all consumers. No matter where we go there is always someone trying to sell us something. Although most don't notice things being sold to them since no one is approaching you, all they need is for you to look. Many retail stores do constant advertising to pull customers to their stores by having color displays that will catch a consumer's attention. Other retail store catches the attention of the public by using successful advertisement by using media like TV and by following what the current age generation looks for. A good example will be Samsung and Apple phones. Apple has been around and is known as a very reliable product for the Silicon Valley where as Samsung is a reliable product around the Globe but because we are in the Silicon Valley, as consumers we majority of the time chooses the product from where we are from. As the generations becoming more and more advance we start to move onto the next "big thing" and explore products like Samsung S3 phone. An youtube clip ad shows an example how the older generation sticks with Apple while the new generation moves onto to better technology.

Bosses and Fighters

In the 1980s there was a soda released by Pepsi called Pepsi crystal clear. Pepsi came out with a soda that was virtually cleared with no colors at all, a transparent soda. This was a great success for Pepsi due to its uniqueness. As Pepsi progressed with its transparent soda Coke Cocola also decided to make its own transparent soda with less success. The two began competing with each other to see who will grab the market with its soda. Coke denies that it tried to steal the market away from Pepsi but it was obvious that they were from the beginning. There was also a myth that the transparent product that Coke produced had such a disgusting flavored that it brought to attention to many that transparent soda were not tasty. This planned worked very well because Coke was the big boss of the soda business where as Pepsi is it's long time competitor. As Coke's transparent soda slowly became less and less popular, so did Pepsi's crystal clear soda. This shows that even though Pepsi had a successful product, it did not had control over the market and influence that Coke has making Pepsi the fighter that lost the battle with the big boss.

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Gender Stereotyping

• Kids Cottage

In the Kids Cottage commercial it seemed very stereotypical for the commercial to only portray a girl starting to be a house wife even at a young age. The commercial shows of the little girls playing with their doll house and having fun doing house hold chores and taking care of babies. This is the gender stereotype for a girl to be responsible for house work while the male is out of the picture to help. This places the idea that to clean and take care of the house is a girl's responsibility. 

• Ketchup Bottle

In the advertisement with the ketchup bottle, a line was added to persuade buyers that the bottle was bottled in a way that is a easy twist off. By successfully advertising this message they placed a picture of a woman asking the question "You mean a woman can open it?" This message in a way says women are weaker than men in strength and are useless when it comes to activities that requires any kind of strength.

• Diet Coke

For the commercial for the diet coke. A man is mowing a lawn with a group of ladies sitting in the distance. The group of girls rolls a can a coke over to the male causing it to spray all over him. This was a tease set up by the group of girls to show that a man should not even be hold a diet anything. This is the stereotypical of how males cannot have diet things and be as macho as possible, but in return for the prank, the male then takes off his shirt to show that he can be macho even with the diet coke.

Netflix

Almost everyone today knows what Netflix is, a popular online streaming website that lets you watch a large selections of movies and shows for low monthly cost. Netflix branded their company very well through advertisement. Though Netflix has been around for a long time they started their advertising their company by changing the regular envelope they keep their rental CDs in to an envelope of their own. Then they slowly progressed onto advertising through relying majority word of mouth and also offering a month of free trial to any new users becoming members. This was a very successful way of promoting their services and from then on not much work was needed to continue to promote their company due to the vast majority people trying it out for free. Netflix continues this trend to continue pulling in customers and keeping them through their 30 days free trial as their branding.

Environmental Campaign

Environmental awareness today is an very important topic today due to the drastic climate change that is beginning to cause global warming. Though global warming is a big issue, it takes eyes away from another issue, the protection of endangered species of animals that are being poached and sold on the market. The WWF or Worldwide Wild Life foundation has made nearly extinct species more known to the public eye. They do this by replacing image of animal with other animals that will give a stronger impact. One example would be the poster WWF has made of the endangered specie of blue fin tuna. They had replace the image of the fish to a more dramatic scene of pandas being slaughtered and laid out for sale.

The image delivers a much bigger impact on viewers due to the fact pandas are more widely known that the blue-fin tuna which causes unawareness. After seeing images like this it forces the media to pay more attention of what is going on around the environment and shares the knowledge through digital media to educate the social public. 

Character stereotype

Pepsi 1992
The pepsi commercial from 1992 portrayed the model Cindy Crawford dressed in an outfit that highlights her features as a woman. Then as she is approaches the pepsi vending machine, two young boys watches her from afar and sighs away at what they are seeing. Once Cindy was done with the pepsi the boys finally mention that they were looking at the can of pepsi instead. Even though the commercial was about pepsi, it still showed that the ideal "hot" woman back in the early 1990's had to be blonde, big breasted, and wearing as least clothing as necessary.

Pepsi 2009
A quick jump from 1992 to 2009, Pepsi attempts a different approach of things. By instead of having woman in the picture, they took on the try of throwing men in the picture. They still use the stereotypical aspect of being a male, being able to take on anything. The commercial shows a bunch of males in-dangering themselves but where as being males they could take on anything. this is the typical gender stereotype of a male having to be macho but in the end the taste of Pepsi is the only thing that makes the men go wow.

Racism in Advertisement

Through out the years, America has become one of the world's largest consumers around the world. To keep up with one of the world's largest consumer country, companies must successfully advertise if they want their product to be popular. But through the years of advertisement there has been many different forms of racism stereotyping used in ads and even till today.
I believe that racial stereotyping in certain commercials are accepted as long as it is under control and non offensive to the racial community. It is not right to have racial stereotyping in ads but if they are unoffensive then it might be ok. An example would be a quote from a website explaining in better details of why there is racial stereotyping in the first place "Not all stereotyping is bad. Stereotyping arises out of the need to generalize in order to make sense out of a very complicated environment. It allows people to easily categorize new things into comfortable spaces already defined by their experiences" web. A bad use of racial stereotyping would be the banned commercial from Pepsi advertising mountain dew

This ad was supposed to be an ad about the addictiveness of mountain dew but it turned into an ad portraying the violent nature of black individuals who end up at screening at police stations.

Racist advertisement is still an ongoing thing even till today but though it is much more under control where once it hits the public, there is still a chance to take it down. Pepsi was one who had to pull down the commercial and wrote a letter of apology to the public after the racist commercial. 

Advertisers should have the responsibilities of keeping an ad from displaying any form of offensive stereotyping in their media ads. I believe that it is necessary for the advertiser to have responsibility to check on the ad before showing it to the public.

Semiotics

Ads have always been an important form of advertising for many products in the market place. The purpose is to deliver a powerful message with as little words as possible through the use of semiotics. Semiotics at first sounds like a very confusing word that sounds almost like something to do with the earth but in reality, it is a word that connects images, signs, and meaning all together to tell the viewer a message through image recognition.

One of the examples of an ad using semiotics that I found on the world wide web is one of the most commonly advertised products, a car. By trying to advertise a powerful SUV is the car for you, designers and the advertising team would have to deliver a message what many SUV owners would want, and that is horse power. This advertisement for a Mitsubishi SUV took the most easily understood way of letting people know a car has horse power, by suspending the car in mid-air showing what is really "inside" the car pulling it and that is full size grown horses capable of hauling heavy loads. This ad works well using semiotics but over all in appearance in my opinion is too simple and does not deliver the message well.

Another good example of semiotic being used in a ad is from the airline Delta. It uses an ingenious way to advertise on things other than their planes, they choose to advertise their services on making the plane ride more up to date with technology to more convenient and interact better with the newer generation. By having an smart phone along with an arm of a businessman showing its sophisticated and comfortable methods of making traveling easier.

The best ad in my opinion that uses semiotics the best will probably be the ad with McDonald's advertising about their fries. By having the least about of words and setting each image in chronological order, they were able to portray the deliciousness of their fries quickly and efficiently from potato to cooked fries to an empty fries container. This ad targets the general audience because it is a food item that all can eat and each image shows what the food is and what it turns into in the next step of its "life". McDonald's had made something very simple to look very good.

Funny/Interesting Super Bowl Commercials

This past recent week super bowl XLVIII was all the rage for many people, but after the upsetting game it was all about the commercials. Although there were many commercials during the super bowl game there were a few that stood out, I would just be specific in which ones I did like.
The first interesting, not very much that I liked it but it was just weird to see, was the commercial from godaddy. They begin the commercial pretty much like any other with commercial by not giving any clue to the audience of what the commercial is about and just going with it. You first see a bodybuilder running by himself and within three seconds, more and more bodybuilders begin to gather in the center of the camera all running forwards. Pretty much almost ten seconds in you have had a whole mob of bodybuilders and one woman bodybuilder all running forwards but then that is when the camera switches over to a tanning salon. That is where you would begin to put the pieces of clues together to what the commercial is all about. Bodybuilders plus a spray tan salon makes sense together and then the commercial ends with the announcement of advertising with godaddy to get your business going.
The other commercial I really did like. It brought back actors from a popular old television show called "Full House" which I watched very often at a younger age. The company that produce the commercial was Dannon's Oikos Greek Yogurt. They had hired all the main characters, except the twins, from full house to act in the comical commercial of two different sex licking off yogurt off of each other. What made the commercial funny to me was that when the yogurt strategically landed on the guy's pants after the girl has licked it from his mouth, Coulier, and Saget pops up to ruin the moment for Dave. The girl then leaves follow by Coulier and Saget cleaning up a pantless Dave.

What I Don't Know About Advertisement

Hello All, My name is Danny Liang and what I don't know about advertisement and advertising is pretty much everything. What is an advertisement? T.V. commercials on Super Bowl Sundays, giant bill boards on the side of highways to distract people, airplane pulling banners saying the words Geico. All these things just seem like images to me to remind me that there is a company that is out there named something and trying to sell me something, but what I want to know is how? What is in their billboards that makes it so attracting for a person to stare and read the whole board? What is the purpose of a commercial being funny about a man who keep telling you to look at him then you and then back at him? All these things have always intrigued me about advertisement and makes me ponder of it's purpose and what were the mindsets of the creators when making the advertisements. The thing I do like about advertising is the ingenious ideas that they are able to come up with for their product.  Again my name is Danny Liang and I am here to learn what is advertisement all about.