Advertising

Advertising is a fun medium to manipulate and often utilizes literary styles, such as persuasion and parody. Ads also sometimes use literary devices (i.e. alliteration, homophones, homonyms, etc.). One can have a lot of fun playing around with this type of media. I havecreated a couple spoofs of advertisements:

Save the landfills!

Visual: The top half of the page is an image of four water bottles with blue and pink labels saying "It's a boy!" and "It's a girl!" is below the text "Welcome the next generation..." The bottom half of the page shows the photo of a worker dwarfed by bundles of used plastic bottles and the text "by trashing their world." Small font in the lower right-hand corner indicates that the ad is paid for by the local chapter of Ditch the Bottles.
Intended message: to discourage people from buying and using bottled water because they are taking over our landfills
Audience: primarily middle- to upper-middle class people, as they are the most likely consumers of bottled water to change their habits
Concept: use an innocent, appealing image and contrast it with a stark, disturbing image. Use words to emphasize message.

Scary silhouettes!

Visual: An image of a woman with a frightened facial expression as she overlooks the silhouette of a person. A dialogue bubble indicates the woman saying, "I fear the evil shadows! Are they holding a detonator?"
Intended message: The silhouette is one of the famous advertisements for ipods. This advertisement is meant to poke fun at them and point out that they can look a little creepy sometimes.
Audience: The people most likely to "get" this ad are those who have some knowledge of the ipod and its advertisements. Furthermore, it pokes fun at people who don't understand this well-known campaign as well as the ipod product. The targeted age group is around 14-29.
Concept: The concept of the advertisement is to use humor to mock a well-known advertising campaign. What the woman says is meant to be funny and slightly absurd, exposing her naiveté about the product.