Essay, Research Paper: Advertising Concepts

ADVERTISING CONCEPTS
This paper is meant to explain some concepts of advertising in cortese s Provocateur. Three basic concepts I will explain, as well as show examples of, are Body Clowning, Body Chopping and Subconscious Seduction. These three concepts are widely used in the advertisement business today. I will be providing and referring to some advertisements, out of magazines, to show these methods. This should further help the understanding of the material being covered.
The first method advertising I will be discussing is Body Clowning. Body Clowning is a technique used to show a happy or entertaining side of the product at hand. In this type of advertising there are usually a man and a woman. The man is being portrayed as very powerful, secure and seductive. Even if they are wearing next to nothing the men are still looking very powerful and intelligent. While the men are being portrayed as the higher power in the ad, the woman are acting very playful and are shown to be almost childish. Some describe them as acting like clowns, hence the name Body Clowning. Now that we are in the 1990 s we have started to change the role of this. The woman is the more serious one, {as in ad #1}, and the guy is acting more playful. This ad shows a man in a football uniform jumping around while the woman is holding a cake and having excellent posture and acting incredibly lady like. Though I could not find any advertisements on the traditional and more popular roles of this topic, there are many out there. This type of advertising, if it is done correctly, can be incredibly affective.
Body Chopping is another advertising concept that is incredibly effective in the modern advertising business. This technique is used in a lot of clothing, cologne/perfume ads and make-up ads. Body Chopping is when a certain part of the body is photographed and shown in the advertisement. This method is supposed to focus on the sexy side in the human body. It is commonly said by critics that it is degrading to women because it makes it seem that a woman s body is more important than her mind. This is mainly used with woman but it is also used with men every once and a while. You can t even flip through a magazine without seeing this method. This is effectively shown in ad number 2. As you can see, the face is the only part of the body being shown in this ad for Revlon. It shows the sexy, full and luxurious lips of a woman. This is supposed to make ladies feel that if they used this brand of make-up than their lips will look as good as the woman s in the ad. In ad number 3 you can see that the persons tongue is in focus. This ad is for the candy Spree. The phrase at the bottom of the page reads It s a kick in the mouth. Now this obviously is saying that this candy will make your mouth feel very good as well as taste terrific but will it really taste like that? You will never know until you try it. This whole point of the ad is to make you want the candy and make you feel like you have to go out right now and buy it. This is made possible by the close up view of the tongue. That is why the method of Body Chopping is so successful.
Out of all the advertisements we see in a day very rarely do we sit down and try to analyze them. If we did do this however, we would find a good bit of subliminal massages inside of an advertisement. Now these are really not very easy to see but they are very catchy to the human eye. These stand out but at the same time have a very different meaning. This is done because the average person looks at an ad for two seconds. This is not leaving a whole lot of time for the ad to make you want to have the product advertised. That is why they put these messages in that stick out, so you can see this and relate to the mood of he ad and want the specific product. We all do this with out even thinking about it, leaving it the name of subconscious. Here are some examples of some subconscious seduction techniques: In lipstick ads the lipstick is usually a symbol for oral or anal sex. Though we are not sure why this is it is proven that it is, oddly enough, a good symbol for this. This actually does sell a lot of these products thought this method.
In conclusion, I hope that these examples have greatly increased your knowledge of at least three of the techniques used by advertisers today in their ads. There is a lot to be said about these advertisements, but they can be very tricky to read and see at the same time. Now that you have been informed on these points, you should be able to pick these things up and understand the advertisements better.