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February 18, 2008
advertising in beer
I never really realized it until i started researching for paper 2, but beer companies really employ some of the most interesting techniques in order to get consumers to purchase their product. This is most likely from an attempt to combat all the negative attention they get, but it is really incredible how good their advertising departments are. Budweiser in particular has had some very memorable advertisements in the past, including the old Super Bowl commercial with the frogs. I'm sure everyone remembers that one. Many of the magazine ads for alcohol i looked at were very interesting as well. In fact in the sports illustrated swim suit issue, Budweiser unleashed a whole series of advertisements showing how they are sponsoring the US Olympic team, by placing attractive Olympic athletes in provocative attire and positions around their beer. This was especially interesting to me, because i always looked more closely at these ads to read who the athlete was and all that kind of thing. I just thought it was interesting how alcohol advertisements tend to stand out so much.
Posted by btrues at 10:36 PM | Comments (0)
February 11, 2008
Visual Rhetoric
Visual Rhetoric is an interesting concept to me. I probably watch more TV than anyone in class. If I had to estimate, I would say on average, I probably watch between 4 and 5 hours per day. I am constantly being bombarded with it. In Romaine's article "Advertising Gender," she argues very intensely about how these advertisements are objectifying women. This may be true that they are exploiting women's bodies in order to sell products, but I personally don't think that seeing women represented in this way makes me think of them as less human. This could just be me, but I doubt it. I just feel that people make much to big a deal about something that is not really an issue. I mean, sure, a company can go too far with it so that it could be really offensive, but usually these types of ads are only in places where mature adult males would see them. Oh well, that's just my opinion.
Posted by btrues at 09:48 PM | Comments (2)
February 04, 2008
A is for American
I found this to be an especially interesting piece of literature. I love learning about quirky pieces of history like that. In fact, when i'm not doing work, i can often be found watching the history channel, so to find out about the interesting relationship between Morse and Webster fascinated me. There was so much I didn't know about them, including the interesting fact that both made their innovations because of their patriotism. There was just so much about both of them that I never new, for instance that Webster wrote the whole dictionary himself and that Morse was a painter, and seemingly created Morse code on a whim! It is interesting to look in retrospect, and see all the unintentional impacts these innovations have made on our lives. Morse code, originally intended for day to day communications between families and to potentially unify the world, is now mostly used by the government to send messages, often during wartime. However, it did lay the foundation for other inventions such as the telephone. The Webster dictionary was also originally intended to help unify the nation by giving it it's own "American language." And perhaps he did accomplish this, but how many of these spellings which he designated for our language actually stuck? Now it is mostly just used to find definitions for words, and spelling is often simply handled by a word processor placing a squiggly red line under the misspelled word. It makes one wonder which of today's technologies may someday achieve different purposes.
Posted by btrues at 10:56 PM | Comments (0)