'Normal' People Advertisments

http://www.adweek.com/aw/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003550048

This is a link to an article I found on a Dove ad that was shown during the Academy Awards this year.
In sticking with advertising, I thought this article was a good way to talk about the readings we had to do for this week.

This article is a critique of the new Dove commercial and campaign. They, like many other companies this year have been opening up the advertising bracket to include normal people like you and me.

Doritos did it during the Super bowl as well as a car company. The companies are realizing that the public has not been happy with the commercials lately, so they thought they would leave it up to the public to create there own.

The ad was a big hit, as many of these ads are simply for the reason that generally ‘normal’ people create what normal people want. By giving one of us free reigns to create a national commercial, it most likely is going to be something much simpler than a team of marketing professionals would be able to come up with because we know what we want.

In McQuails reader this week, Chapter 27 titled “Meaning and Ideology” Judith Williamson says that “For even the ‘obvious’ function of advertising- ‘to sell things to us’- involves a meaning process. Advertisements must take into account not only the inherent qualities and attributes of the products they are trying to sell, but also the way in which they can make those properties mean something to us.”

So, the overall point of advertisements is for them to mean something to us. What better way to ensure they mean something to us, than to have ‘us’ create them?

I think that in the next few years or so you are going to see a lot more companies coming up with this idea of letting the ‘normal’ people create our own ads.

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This blog is hosted by Prof. Lisa Burns and her MSS 331/JRN-ICM 522 Media Influence class. If you have something to say about media and how it influences society, this is the place.