Aaah.. Adverteasing!

Ah.. the Atlantic came in, and if there is one thing more fun than exploring the nooks and crannies of academia it is exploring the nooks and crannies of advertisements.

Why?

Because it keeps me from my schoolwork!

Here's a really nice advert from a corporate swine. The things I like:

• Notice the use of part of the "Target" pallette. So that places the colors for all of us. We don't even have to think about colors because in the last two years we have seen this semi-orange and that blue (though not normally this saturated) so many times. The only risk this runs is that some of us might subconsciously miss the yellow and green. ;-)

• It moves from left to right in increasing levels of complexity. You can get the message from the left panel. If you turn to the next page you have already got, in a glance, what they want you to know. US = 3%. Time to panic folks. Then the little "So what does that mean for us" slides you niftily over the the next panel full of detail

• And they do a sweet job of presenting that detail. The "letter in an ad" is a great way to present dense text that would look insane if it were just laid out as normal ad text. And the letter, PDA, clippings, notepad and sketches automatically chunk information just the way you'd want and allow some nice visual differences.

A sweet advert by some corporate criminals. I give it 4 dollar bills leaving the consumer's wallet (You can see this pic in all its enormous glory by clicking on the picture below).

Here's another truly great one...

More criminal fucks... but what a nice job of taking the simple curve of a woman and tying GE's image to it. I went back and forth, visually, on whether I preferred the woman with our without the bandage on. I think I preferred the picture with the bandage off and that it was slightly more visually arresting. But the thing is that when you actually recognize that the bandage is not print, when you go to the trouble to peel it off and reveal what lies beneath? They have you visually and kinesthetically. Which is a neat trick to pull in a magazine ad.

.........

Finally an ad that can be classified under "Complete fucking lie" and looks like it was envisioned and created by that "Painter of Light" guy who uses the religious iconography, unusual light sources (if by unusual you mean physically impossible), and happy scenes that belie the reality that he is a fat drunken abuser who urinates on Winnie the Pooh (Not that there is anything wrong with that!)

which I prefer to see as

but I'm a cynic