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| Author: Unknown Date: 2013 Location: N/A |
After further examination of this text you see the obvious use of wrath, a deadly sin, to appeal to customers. This deadly sin is expressed through twisted dark humor. This use of "shoot your girlfriend" is humorous at first because you can "shoot" your girlfriend meaning take a picture of her, not shoot her with a gun. But after you look at the ad you realize that Reeva Steenkamp is the girlfriend being "shot". Well who is Reeva Steenkamp? She is the former girlfriend of Olympic athlete Oscar Pistorius and was shot do death by Pistorius in 2013. Suddenly the slightly comedic phrase on this ad becomes heinous because the girl pictured was shot and killed. This is likely the reason the ad was not approved and not published by Panasonic, but it was still created and is all over the internet.
The likely intended audience (if it was actually published) would have likely been middle or upper class because the camera pictured is about a $500 camera which is pretty expensive and is a luxury to most people. While the camera can be for men or women, this ad would have most likely been placed in a magazine for men because it uses the term girlfriend appealing to the male gender. It is likely that the intended audience would not realize the significance of the girl pictured and will only find the humor on the surface.
Kev-
ReplyDelete1) Your font gives me a headache man. Let's keep things professional?
2) I think it's awesome that you did extra research on this ad, and discovered who the women pictured was. At the surface, the ad has a "cute" tone, with bubbly font, and a smiling, beautiful girl on the camera. In reality, and thanks to you I would never had guessed, the advertisement is actually really dark and kind of messed up. This made me think about how many ads I see every day may have deeper meanings that fly over my head. Although I don't think there are many as extreme as this, it's still good to be reminded to not become numb to the constant media we are surrounded with. Good job bud, it's cool you found an ad not actually printed, that was caught by editors before it could print or air. However, this ad is so extreme I wonder if it was ever truly a serious ad, or a dark joke that became viral on the internet. Something to think about.
3) Tell your sister I said hey
Going off of what Tyler said in his first point, I'd suggest Comic Sans as a font. I think it is very interesting that you chose this ad, as at first it appears to be fairly harmless, however it does have a fairly significant amount of dark humor. This is amplified by the pun, which is the only print on the ad other than product details. The use of Reeva Steenkamp leads me to believe that the pun was intentionally used with her image. All of this causes me to think that this may have not been an actual ad for Panasonic, because only an employee wishing to get fired would put forward something like this. I think it may have originated as a joke on the internet, but is still a good choice for analysis. Also, what deadly sin did it use?
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