What You Are Seeing Is… An American entertainer, Will Rogers, once said, “Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they do not have for something they do not need” (Web). This is the power of the advertisement; it has a power to persuade people even though it might not be on their shopping list. Hundreds of advertisements are put in to our brains every day of our lives, but out of those hundreds of advertisements, how many of them cross your mind when you buy something?
There are different types of advertisement out there, such as television commercials and radio commercials that try to catch many minds of audiences; however, the most fascinating type of advertisement has to be the rhetoric advertisement. A rhetoric advertisement is a type of advertisement that only uses image and texts to appeal to consumers. In order to get consumers attention, advertisers have to put all their intended ideas into just one image. The Slim Fast advertisement did an excessive job of making an effective advertisement with only one piece of a visual rhetoric.
Image in visual rhetoric advertisement is an essence that plays a key role in advertising. In the advertisement, Slim Fast, the scene is taken in wedding hall, where there is a wedding cake and on top of the wedding cake there are toy figures of groom and bride; however, the bride is falling into the cake and it reads in a small font, “Need to lose a little weight before your wedding? ” The woman is falling into the wedding cake because she is being portrayed as an overweight person. It was really humorous to see how the groom is perfectly shaped, and do not even have single dent on his side of the wedding cake.
The groom toy tries to help her out by reaching her hands and that is where the product, Slim Fast, is diagonally lined up with the groom’s hands. Another way that an image can be effective is by coloring of a whole picture. In this advertisement, the Slim Fast went with a theme of bright colors. Bright color gives an outlook of a positive image. When one takes a look at this advertisement that positive image is being presented right into one’s mind. Bright colors also match with the theme of a wedding. The background is kind of blur, but also bright, so the focus goes more to the edding cake and to bride and gloom. The product also pops out at a first glance with a help of lighting because everything is in bright colors, but the product has some red color in it and it makes the product outstands from the rest of the background color to help the advertising to be more effective. In this advertisement, text is another piece that is a significant aspect of this visual rhetoric. The text, “Need to lose a little weight before your wedding? ” analyze what the picture is really about.
If one was to look at this picture, that person would not know what this advertisement was about, but the text really explains that this is about a weight loss product. Another interesting text part was the some of word choices. The text writes, “Need to lose a little weight? ” the word “need” emphasizes the importance of losing a weight. If Slim Fast were to choose the word “want”, it would mean less to viewers because it really makes losing a weight an option, but the word “need” articulates the meaning of losing a weight to viewers. The word, “little”, is also an interesting word choice.
Given that everything about this advertisement is being small and tiny, the word, “little”, relates to the being slim and skinny. If you want an advertisement to be even more adequate, even the smallest thing matters like a font and picture size. In this advertisement, the text’s font is very small to say at least. What the advertiser was trying to accomplish was that by writing the text with a small font, it kind of relates to the losing a weight. By making it small, it lays down an image of that everything about this product is small, and if consumers use this product, they will get small too.
The other small things are two toy figures of bride and groom. Even though the bride is the one, who is being characterized as overweight, she also looks like a small person, when looking at her hands. What the advertiser is indirectly trying to say is that it does not matter how fitted you might think you are, you can always use our product to get thinner and that is how you can take one more step to having that perfect body you have always wanted. The size of can is also an important thing to notice.
Instead of putting a large image of Slim Fast’s product like most other advertisements do, the company decided to put an actual size of their product. The reasoning is that the company did not want to make anything big because of their motive of generating everything small. The most crucial part of advertising is targeting your audiences. It matters to study the major group of consumers, who use the company’s product the most. The Slim Fast Company did an outstanding job of attacking their major audiences by putting this advertisement in the magazine, which females read more than men do.
Given that the female audience is more likely to use these types of product, they did a great job of articulating woman as the one, who was looked at as overweighed. The company also used the theme of wedding, which helped to appeal even more to female audiences. Overall, the company did a tremendous job of appealing their product and putting it in to your mind with humor at the same time. Another way that Slim Fast manipulated their female audience was by using the sins of vanity and envy. This advertisement unknowingly contains vanity and envy.
Woman’s physical attribute and the vanity purposely go together. Many women believe that it is a pride to have a well-shaped body. Most weight loss products take this route to appeal to their consumers and the Slim Fast Company did exactly that in order to claim their product as the best one out in the market. The other interesting part here is envy. When looking at this image, it is hard to say that it contains envy; however, the text reads, “Need to lose a little weight before your wedding? The word “little” kind of make this line sarcastic, but at the same time it tells the audience that you only need to lose a little weight in order to have that perfect body that you always envied from someone else. Overall, just the text part of this advertisement is phenomenal and it really catches your mind directly. Even before analyzing this advertisement, it was easy to see how the society views overweight person. First and for most, the image had a woman falling into the wedding cake, which emphasized the importance of being overweight as a woman in this society.
The society today really rejects the idea of being overweight, especially if it is a female. Health might be the main reason, but one’s look has more to do with this sadness. The society wants woman to be beautiful and thin; that is the bottom line. Being overweight is becoming almost like a crime and it seems like this problem is getting worse every year. When looking at this advertisement and reading the text, which wrote, “Need to lose a little weight…” not want. Why is it that in our society today someone is being told by someone that they “need” to lose a weight? Disregarding the health aspect, this is obviously over the line.
No one should ever feel guilty about being an overweight, but the word “need” is putting an exclamation mark on a person that you should never be overweighed. The important thing here is that it does not matter what type of woman you are, if you are overweight then it is hard for woman to be confident and face the public as a regular human being. Another sociological view of this advertisement is it shows how important the wedding is to woman and how happy it makes them feel. It is obvious to know that woman loves having that first, and hopefully the last, wedding of their lives.
That is why this advertisement chose the theme of wedding to emphasize the fact that if one was to have a wedding that they always have dreamed of since they were little kids, then they must be fitted and look the best that they can be. The society is saying that if one was not well-shaped the way one should be, then it would be hard to have a happy wedding. Every advertisement has something that they want the viewers to get their mind across to. In the advertisement for the Slim Fast, they did an excellent job of taking something that might be offensive and turned it into a comical advertisement that really catches audiences mind.
