Understanding Advertising: Decoding an Ad's Appeal

In this assignment you will make a web page, part of your web journal, on advertising and its history. Your web page must include the images you discuss.

Your assignment is to pick four 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

Ellis Collection of Kodakiana

Lux Advertisements

Pond's Advertisements

On your web page, 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?

Then find four 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 on your web page, as either stills or as movies. 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 website 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. Here is a brief guide to making your own website.

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.