For my poster I created a black and white vector graphic of Uncle Sam from the Montgomery Flagg poster, but instead of pointing at the viewer, he has an open hand, with the caption “I want YOUR money”. It’s kind of a parody of the original Montgomery Flagg poster, tweaked to show the essence of the subject matter my essay deals with. I am quite pleased with it visually and feel that it successfully represents the essay.

Justin Bieber’s TV Roast – Image Marketing

Last year pop star Justin Bieber partook in a Comedy Central TV roast as the subject. I saw a few clips from it and realised it was quite relevant to what I was studying, so I thought I’d talk about it here. It’s a show where a celebrity goes up on stage to have jokes made at their expense by a panel of various comedians and other celebrities. While entertaining, it is essentially propaganda, or “spin” in this case, to improve Justin Bieber’s public image.

Seeing a celebrity laugh off a barrage of insults – all in good fun – has the effect of humbling them, making them seem more likable and relatable. It shows us that they don’t take themselves too seriously. Whether it’s honest or not it has the same effect.

DRIP and AIDA

My father teaches business at my local college, and since I am looking at advertising I decided to ask him if he had any resources I could use. Fortunately he did, in the form of a textbook called “Marketing Communications Engagement, Strategies and Practice”. I came across a couple advertising models, “DRIP” and “AIDA”, in the form of acronyms. They serve as guidelines on how to properly and successfully advertise a product. I felt that these would be useful in properly understanding advertising, so I have outlined what each mean below.

 

DRIP:

Differentiate – Define what place your product has in the market in order to differentiate it from the rest.

Reinforce – Strengthen your message, make it clear why your product is superior, cheaper, easy to use, etc…

Inform – Make people aware of your product/brand, and if it is unique or has unique qualities your marketing needs to educate and inform people of this.

Persuade – Persuade your audience not only to buy your product, but also to become more aware of your product/brand, e.g. “visit the website”, “share this page”, “request a trial”, etc.

 

AIDA:

Attention – Surprise the viewer with something unexpected, make your advert attractive, it needs to get the viewer’s attention.

Interest – Have a relevant message, details about the product, pricing, etc… needs to hold the viewers interest.

Desire – Increase the desirability of your product, for example, talk about the positives, make the viewer see how they will benefit from the product, have someone respected/famous in your advert, etc…

Action – Convince the viewer to “act now”, possibly via a sale time limit or limited supply, “while stocks last”.

 

It isn’t absolutely necessary to follow every one of these to advertise successfully, there are plenty examples that don’t, but these seem to be the basic guidelines to advertising a product.

7 Propaganda Techniques Students Should Understand

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140815205902-57567806-7-propaganda-techniques-all-students-should-learn

This is a post I found quite interesting, detailing 7 propaganda techniques that are used in advertising. It’s what made me come to the fairly obvious realisation that that is all advertising really is; propaganda. The 7 techniques are outlined below with my own thoughts:

1. Glittering Generalities

Essentially this is just general words of praise made to appeal to the particular audience.

2. Name Calling

Positive comparisons to a rival product or company, ASDA vs TESCO, and Coca Cola vs PEPSI for example “ASDA has x amount of products cheaper than TESCO”

3. Testimonial

When a popular famous person endorses a product. Fans of this person would then become more aware/interested by this product.

4. Plain Folks

Regular people, “average joes” that are relatable and appeal to most people and their values like family, health, etc

5. Bandwagon

The “everyone is doing it” technique, that popularity = quality and value

6. Transfer

I’m actually not entirely certain I understand this one, but I think it’s talking about painting a scenario that people can see themselves in/want to be part of?

7. Card-stacking 

Biased, unfair comparison, omitting negatives, focusing only on positives. I think most if not all advertisements are guilty of some of this. I don’t think I’ve seen any advertisement talk about a product’s negatives.

 

I think this is useful knowledge for everyone, advertisements can be quite manipulative and knowing this would likely make you more wary about what you buy based on adverts. I think most people are guilty of purchasing 1 or 2 things without doing proper research, and end up having wasted their money when the product doesn’t work as advertised.

Propaganda Posters

The topic of propaganda was covered in a lecture by Anna Powell. It was an interesting lecture overall, more specifically it covered war propaganda from WW1 and WW2 and also how these events sparked the origin of DADA. I want to focus on the propaganda posters here as they are what interested me the most.

The Lord Kitchener poster (above), is a British poster designed by Alfred Leete for WW1 recruitment. It is minimal, but effective, with the caption “your country needs you” speaking directly to the individual with the finger pointing. It’s designed to make you feel that this is your duty. Created with efficiency in mind, this poster was rapidly mass-produced and became extremely widespread. It was very effective, causing many copycats to spawn.

This poster (above) was created by James Montgomery Flagg for WW1, and took heavy inspiration from the Kitchener poster as you can tell. Not only did these posters instill duty, they also served to make young men who weren’t enlisting feel guilty, especially the Kitchener poster with the wording, “your country needs you”. Both of these posters are extremely famous, and still get parroted and parodied all over the world.

This poster was designed by Savile Lumley, with the intention primarily to shame and guilt men into signing up. It instills this by depicting a scene for the viewer, of their children asking ” Daddy, what did YOU do in the great war?” The capitalisation of “you” coupled with the father in the poster looking out at the viewer makes it quite personal to the individual, a trait shared with the other posters above.

I found all this very interesting, how this artwork “sold war to the youth” via manipulation, and the questionable morality of it all.