Adbusters
Adbusters was founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia. The organisation is built up of “artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age” {1}. I am going to analyse two ad designs that Adbusters have created as I believe it is relevant to the work that I will/have produced.
Analysis *1
(Above) in this photograph, you can see that the organisation, ‘Adbusters’ have produced an appropriation or parody of the Macdonald’s cheese burger. You can see that in the example, there are ten pieces of beef where usually there is only one or two pieces of beef in one burger.
At the bottom of the Ad, there is the text ‘ARE WE HAPPY YET?’. At the top right, below the letters ‘RS’ in ‘ADBUSTERS’ there is another comment that says ‘AMERICA’. Connecting the two text together create a different meaning of what they want to show.
Quoting ‘are we happy yet?’ is a question that they are asking about we can only presume is the food on the Ad but also what the Ad is representing. In this case, the advert is indicating that we as humans eat too much fast food. They are trying to emphasise this in the advert design by having the abnormal amount of burger filling in one burger.
Analysis *2
(Above) in this advert, you can see a man wearing Calvin Kline underwear but he is looking down towards his groin area pulling the underwear away from his body. The title of the photograph is called “Obsession”, shown at the top of the design with “for men” at the bottom. In typical Calvin Kline adverts, the male model is seen to be over the top expressing a dominate look which is shown on the advert. This however, is misinterpreted by adolescents as being the norm of how they should look. This poster is showing that the model in the advert is ‘obsessed’ of what his genitalia should look like, portraying this as a norm of what you think when you look at a poster advertising male underwear. I believe that this is a good appropriation of what underwear advertisers want us to believe.
Referances:
{1} About Adbusters 2015. Avaliable from: https://www.adbusters.org/about/adbusters (assessed on 7/10/2015