Advertising the Honeycomb Case Advertising

¶ … Advertising The Honeycomb Case Advertising contributes to the devolution of human civilization by contributing to the devolution of humans themselves, from homo sapiens to consumo sapiens. The ad in question, one for Honeycomb, does this by objectifying a female, relegating her to the status of a consumable item, and demonstrating that what happiness she enjoys she owes to her consumption of the product and its merchandising in as many ways as possible. So, when Pozner (p.

52) observes regarding Josie and the *****cats, "Josie updates its perky, cartoon rockers as jiggly, giggly girl-band members who...become unsuspecting pawns in a plot to transform America's youth into mindless, shopaholic drones," as ridiculous as this sounds, it is not so very far from what advertisers are actually doing to us. Appeals to our reason would probably not entice any of us to purchase a particular brand of cold sweetened breakfast cereal, since these are all basically nutritionless, high-calorie crud.

To get us to buy crud, advertisers must thwart reason and appeal to our other, non-cognitive processes. Since human beings are still animals (regardless of what else we may be), we respond at least at some level the way other animals do - according to our visceral drives and instincts. In this case, they target our appetites for sex and food and make free use of repetition throughout.

From the preponderance of the color pink we can infer that the advertisers think they are appealing to females who enjoy sweet cereal but hope to be "anything but ordinary." Adult females tend to be in sufficient possession of themselves that peer pressure and faddishness play smaller roles in shaping their purchase decisions than the same forces do in shaping the decisions of adolescent or young adult females, so this ad likely targets high school through college-aged females.

As for why the advertisers think consumers would care about the product by looking at the ad, the fact that the honeycomb merchandising theme is plastered throughout implies that this would be one way to distinguish oneself from the pack. After all, the bathroom could just as easily have been done up a la Martha Stewart. It appeals to the average consumer a number of ways. The model is lovely; thus, our appreciation for beauty is invoked, and bathing in milk is supposedly good for getting beautiful skin.

The model is probably also "sweet" for honeycomb is a sweetened cereal, and she is bathing in it. Implicitly, we also know that to bathe properly, one must be nude, so the model must be nude. The advertisers' main assumption about the audience is that they have become so jaded by much more provocative ads that combining sexual imagery with an otherwise mundane product will serve to tweak an otherwise desensitized nerve. To quote Kilbourne (p.

277), "Most of us become numb to these images..." In other words, using sex to sell jeans or perfume no longer raises eyebrows, but using it to sell cold breakfast cereal?! Egad! As for cultural or racial stereotypes, the model is white and the milk is white - perhaps reinforcing some notion that white is good, though this may be reaching. From her conspicuous consumption of product-related merchandise it is safe to assign her firmly to the upper middle class.

Gender stereotypes and messages abound in this ad, as in many others. One example is the woman-as-food or woman-as-product message; she is something to be eaten or consumed like any other fast-moving consumer good, which sets a dangerous precedent. "Turning a human being into a thing, an object, is almost always the first step toward justifying violence against that person." (Kilbourne, p. 278). The implied consequence for buying the product is becoming desirable as an extraordinary female.

Those who fail to buy the product must resign themselves to a passionless life full of mediocrity. Extraordinary females are those whose lives are saturated with the product. Pozner (p.

51) gives evidence of this actually happening when she says, "What disturbs me is not that I prefer the taste of Snapple (I do), but that the brand itself has infiltrated my vocabulary to such an extent that in my day-to-day vernacular, Snapple is iced tea." While the model's expression is not especially suggestive (she is far from sultry), it is nevertheless a very congenial expression, and one we might think she would maintain no matter what was done or said to her.

Further, while the model's right arm is raised above her head in a gesture of relaxed repose, her fingers clearly form what every American school child would recognize as sign language for "I Love You." Does the model love just honeycomb or the audience as well? Perhaps as a kind of "honeycomb girl" she represents the product itself telling us it loves us. Her left hand rests on the edge of the pink tub, but her index and middle fingers are spread suggestively like legs, and the tub is pink..

For her feet to be in.