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Dove is a USA based hygene and beauty company owned by the multinational company Unilever. They sell a range of products from soap, to deodorant to lotion, firming cream, and other toiletries. What's particular about Dove is their brand image, as they've chosen to market their brand and promote their image as a body positive, progressive brand, rather than market their product. There's an inherent hypocrisy to their ads ; they often try to market themselves as feminist or body positive, but they're part of the beauty industry as a whole, and are owned by a company that owns other more mainstream beauty brands that contribute to the unhealthy narrative about women's bodies.
print advert rationaleFor this project, we were tasked with making our own advertisement and presenting it to our class, explaining all of the techniques of advertising we used to make it.
I decided to make a spoof ad, because I felt that the best way for me to include as many techniques as possible was to create a satire of ads, and exaggerate all such techniques. I then had to present it to the other students to explain what I did, which also helped train me for my IO as it let me practice my presentational skills and my ability to structure an analysis orally.
I enjoyed creating the advertisement, and it helped me directly learn the effects of certain advertising techniques, because I got to put them in practice.
To prepare for paper 1 exams about advertising, I did my first analysis of an ad (pictured above), first using an ad deconstruction template provided by my teacher, and then attempting to structure it into a paper 1. I found that the most challenging part about this exercise to be seperating information into different themed paragraphs when planning my essay : ads aren't a particularly subtle meaning, and they often concentrate a lot of visual information into one screen, having a very big potential for analysis. Annotating an ad or filling out a template doesn't take very long for me to do, but I had trouble writing this paper 1 because of how challenging it was for me to organise my essay structure.
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