Sunday 16 May 2010

The impact society has on advertising



It has been said that there is no truer representation and social documentation of a particular time period than by looking at advertising from the time. It can be very enlightening as to what the fears/values were of the time. In order to hi-light this as much as possible It's interesting to look at a long standing corporate giant like Coca-Cola and compare its two ads with 50 years difference. The first ad, launched in the 50's depicts a young modern housewife taking a break from housework in order to enjoy "the pause that refreshes" with her coke. Notice key features which have been deliberately drawn into the scene like the the new icebox and vacuum cleaner showing this is the successful modern wife who can afford these luxuries. i also find it hilarious that the tag line and paragraph refer to a break from cleaning the house which coke would never dream of including in a campaign today.

The second advertisement is from 2006 and depicts a kind of fictional wonderland in which everything stems around coke. Notice how it is deliberately asexual in order not to alienate any party. If they are going to get gender specific nowadays they have to categorise it with an entirely separate drink eg diet coke (female) coke zero (male) which each gets specifically targeted ad campaigns made for it. Sticking with regular Coke, this ad has no emphasis on anything really other than a kind of light hearted fun filled land in which there are no problems and everyone enjoys coke. a lot of advertising seems to be going down this route at the moment and i'm not really rating it.

on a purely artwork and no concept basis the 50's one still wins hands down, this happy computer graphics stuff is rubbish.

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