4-12-2011
Reflective Writing
Writing Prompt 1 – Questions about your analysis
What ideas are underlie in the text you are analyzing?
After seeing the car commercials, I have started to further look at commercials and advertisements in a more careful matter. It honestly has never come across my mind that they might be trying to sell a certain image that comes with the car. Once I put some thought into this, I have realized that most companies and originations are doing this I have now come to the conclusion that all advertisements have some sort of hidden messages that it is trying to portray. So for my advertisements I chose to focus on something a little unusual, I chose to look at the cleaning industry. In particular I focused my efforts on the Swiffer duster, Lysol and Pinsol.
Most of the advertisements are trying to portray a sense of power or wealth with the use of their product. With my search with cleaning products, I recognized that they are doing this by the image of the house that they are trying to clean. I noticed that they never clean a dirty or a small house. The houses that are in the commercials are all luxurious that most middle class people will never get to own in their lifetime. The houses in the advertisement are mostly white. White gives off a sense of purity and being clean.
Every time I watch the commercials I came up with a different message. The reoccurring thoughts that I have been getting is that rich people are clean. Therefore if you want to appear to be living the rich and wealthy lifestyle then you have to be clean and organized. I do not think that this is the case. Anyone can be clean; you don’t have to make a certain income just to be clean and not a slob.
What types of associations is it trying to make?
By showing the advertisement in a big house it appeals to a greater amount of people. It appeals to the lower class people by giving them a sense of hope and dreams. It appeals to the richer and wealthier people by showing the big house.
How is the text representing a certain group of people? What kind of effect could this have?
For this question I looked at the Pinsol commercials. I am not being racist but I did notice that the lady who was narrating the commercial was of African American descent. I think that by doing that they can associate with more than just one type of person. I think that it was a very smart thing for them to do.
I think that by reaching out to both the wealthy people and to African American people you can almost double your profit. This makes it more marketable and thus meaning more profits will be made.
I also noticed that they were all targeted to women. All the cleaning commercials I have ever seen all have a women doing the cleaning. I wonder if they know that men can clean too. This is kind of sexist in my opinion. Even though it is sexist it must be working because they are making millions of dollars a year. I think that it is marketed toward women because that is usually who does the shopping for the household.
Closing Thoughts:
Just like car commercials and cigarette commercials portray to men, cleaning commercials are geared towards women. I think this is very smart as most people don’t really realize this. I know I didn’t realize this until we discussed it in class.
Popular Culture 