Analysis of an Advertisement

One thing everyone does, but probably doesn’t realize they are doing it is analysis of advertisements. Whether they see an ad flash across the TV screen or they come across advertisements in a magazine, everyone is always doing a quick analysis. Most people don’t spend a lot of time analyzing, they glance and flip to the next page, or maybe even turn the channel. There are a lot of elements that marketers and graphic designers need to consider when making an ad and I am going to share what I have learned on how to analyze a print advertisement. 

One of my first projects assigned to me when I started the program at the University of Northern Iowa was to do an advertisement analysis. Everyone in the class was given a ad found by the teacher and on a poster had to point out the elements the advertisement had to make it visually appealing as well as write some copy about it.

This is the first time I had ever seriously analyzed an advertisement and I learned there is a lot more to the ad the more I visualized and thought about it.

The elements that can quickly be picked out from the ad are color, the use of space, and direction. Shown is a visual way I was able to pull out the color and ad lines to show the strong direction used in the golf advertisement. What people don’t realize, just like I didn’t when I was doing this project is the underlying questions marketers need to ask themselves when having the designer make the ad. The three important questions I’ve learned to ask when analyzing a ad are:  

1. What does the text say? 

2. Who is the ad targeting?

3. What does the image say?

These questions can be thought of more deeply as well; what is the relationship between the copy and the image? Is there a theme? What is the use of the space saying? After asking the questions people will have a better understanding of why the ad made the decisions it did. Not everyone needs to analyze an ad, but learning how to is interesting because you can look at an ad a quickly learn the message the marketers were trying to get across, which sometimes isn’t what people think at first glance.

While researching a bit of this topic I came across the website http://www.frankwbaker.com/checklist.htm. I found this checklist helpful if there was ever a time someone needed to analyze an ad, it has all the important things that are needed to be thought about when doing the analysis.

 

These two Nike ads ran together, but are separate. Like every ad there is a message that isn’t clearly seen on the surface, only people who analyze the ad will be able to understand what the marketers are saying. Clearly put the explicit messages; “Ladies First, Men Second” or “One More Thing for Men to Rule”  on each ad is shown with large, white text, which is prominent. These ads are dealing with what some people see as gender issues, but both messages are empowering. What underlying message do you analyze? To know more visit http://www.reed.edu/anthro/adprojects/2011/gould_ramey_butcher/ to understand what the ads were trying to portray and what the messages were.