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Understanding Advertising: Decoding an Ad's Appeal
In this assignment you must include the images you discuss in your journal. Your assignment is to pick two ads from no later than the mid 1920s. Choose advertisements from one or more of these four digital collections at Duke University Beauty and Hygiene section of Ad*Access In your journal , identify how the ads make their appeal, and how that appeal relates to issues and themes that were prominent at the time. Make sure to do a close analysis of the ads you have chosen, and give specific examples. How does the ad reflect issues and concerns of people at the time? Avoid saying this like "this ad appeals to people's desire to look good." there is no ad that appeals to people's desire to look bad: the more interesting question is maybe "what does 'good' mean, and does it change over time? What does the changing notion of "good "tell us about the diofference between then and now? Then find two modern ads which use the same sorts of appeals. The ads can be found online, or you can take them from magazines and scan them. You can use TV or film ads, but they must be presented journal, as either digital images or as pictures cut out. Subject the modern ads to the same kind of analysis that you apply to the historical ads. The modern ads do not have to be for the same things, but they do have to use similar appeals. Your journal should include a detailed analysis of each ad--how it works, what kinds of strategies or appeals it uses, and its relation to the period it came from. You need to make an argument: it is not enough to simply describe what is in the ad. You also need to do more than simply state the obvious. For example, saying "this ad appeal to people's desire to look good" is very weak--when have peopl ever wanted products that would make them look bad? Similarly, it is not enough to say something like "these ads reflect people's desire for a good product at a good price." When have people ever wanted a bad product at a high price? You need to set the ads in their context, and relate them to the history they come from. You can also look at this guide to making sense of images, which goes into more detail about the ways historians do a close analysis of images.
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