Tuesday, February 28, 2012

There's a complicated set of images here, since the original source is a two minute long commercial and there didn't seem to be a single frame that adequately captured the entire narrative. This is the original commercial, featuring Megan Fox:

Given that this is a Turkish commercial and I have no idea what most of the dialog is saying, much of the meaning of the commercial is undoubtedly lost on me. (No one online seems to have translated it.) Nonetheless, at its core is a reasonable example of the usual pattern of body-directed advertising:

  • Consumer has body tagged as undesirable.
  • Consumer is offered product to "fix" undesirable body.
  • Consumer's life is transformed.
  • Consumer is rewarded by adulatory crowds.
This same pattern is used even for products that have nothing directly to do with the body—and even those, like calorie-rich foods, which in reality usually have the opposite effect. This logic is clearly absurd, and yet advertisers continue to use this pattern, so it seems to be effective in some way that bypasses logic.

This particular commercial seems to acknowledge the absurdity of this trope and apply it in an ironic and over-the-top manner. For all I know, it might actually be intended as a parody of American-style advertising. However, there seems to be a somewhat common trend in advertising to use irony in a very similar manner; modern consumers are assumed to know the "tricks" used by advertisers, so instead of aiming for subtle influences, the tricks are acknowledged ("lampshaded") and used blatantly for humor value, in hopes that the humor will be enough to keep the idea of the product in the consumer's mind.

This technique was called out and identified on the Feminist Frequency YouTube channel as "Retro Sexism and Uber Ironic Advertising." In the examples given by Feminist Frequency, the absurd tropes used ironically involve stereotypes of clueless women and callous, manipulative men. This commercial, if it is indeed a similar sort of "uber ironic advertising," uses a somewhat different and less retro trope, but it works in a similar way.

Works Cited
Lampshade Hanging. (n.d.). TV Tropes. Retrieved February 28th, 2012, from http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging

Retro Sexism and Uber Ironic Advertising. (2010). Feminist Frequency. Retrieved February 28th, 2012, from http://www.feministfrequency.com/2010/09/retro-sexism-uber-ironic-advertising/

Usmar, J. (2012). Megan Fox stars in the weirdest advert we've ever seen (video). The Mirror. Retrieved February 28th, 2012, from http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/weird-celeb-news/megan-fox-stars-in-a-turkish-commercial-742564


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