1. Ads for Analysis
• Look carefully at these ads.
• The goal is to sell the product.
• What choices—colors, setting, imagery—do
the sellers make to sell this product?

3. Pretty young girl
Huge Yellow Letters Dominate
Why a young girl?
Why black and white?
Statement makes fun of
Valley Girl
Why run an ad that makes fun of a Pretty
Valley Girl???
Curiosity raised: look at the fine
print: Statements like this are
mean, and so is saying “It’s so gay.”

4. Other Data Points:
Importance of words vs picture
Words overpower person (implied symbolic insight)
Overuse of like (ridicule language tic)
Tiny box makes us work hard to read it
Use of “you,” second person, intimate
Content of tiny box “names” reader’s thoughts
Yellow on left ties back to content of big yellow letters
on right

5. Thesis:
This ad, from ThinkB4YouSpeak.com, addresses
what has become a major problem in American
schools: bullying.
Rather than simply invoking a cliché that people
should be nice to one another, the ad relies on
shock value, since the person featured is not
likely to be a person targeted for bullying.

6. Older man, fisherman
Smiling Showing catch
Dried up lake
dominates
landscape
Line of trees
Sunny blue sky
Severely sunburned
arm
WWF & white copy stand out

7. Thesis
• Images of happy fishermen proudly
displaying their catches are commonplace in
family albums and resort brochures. However
this ad from the World Wildlife Fund uses
those images to make a different kind of
point. In this ad, the smiling fisherman is
positioned in what is clearly a severely
compromised natural environment, one that,
as the ad implies, will continue to decline
unless we tackle global warming head on.

8. Planets dominate 1/3 page
One of several references to
Cost of RV travel
Isolated setting
Vehicle embedded in
nature
Night sky
Two people
Physical separation of
Passengers from RV

9. Thesis
• This ad for RV travel uses the unusual image of
the planets to sell its product. Although no
one travelling in an RV can actually get to the
planets, travelling in one of these vehicles, the
ad suggests, offers the next best thing: access
to a site free of pollution where it is possible
to see them in action when they next make
rare appearances in our galaxy.