Analyse the two advertisements used the recent government ‘Act on CO2 initiative commenting on the effectiveness of the campaign. Global warming is an issue that everyone is aware of, and there are many campaigns out there informing us about how to prevent it. Perhaps the most effective campaigns are those coming from Act on CO2. Be it changing how the story ends for our children, or driving 5 miles less a week, Act on CO2 is a campaign that is not afraid to be controversial. I will be talking about two such advertisements.
The first such advert is the ‘twinkle twinkle’ advert, where they change a popular children’s nursery rhyme to get their message across. The fact that they use a nursery rhyme gives the impression that preventing CO2 emissions is ‘child’s play’ and is easy. However it could also infer to the fact that eventually the CO2 emissions are going to affect our children. The second advert is the car emissions advert, in which a car is portrayed as a chimney. This could refer to the car being a nuclear power plant chimney, which we all associate that as a big factor in CO2 emissions.
Also this portrays the car in a negative way and would encourage more people to use it less. In the ‘twinkle twinkle’ advert pink is the background colour. The colour pink connotes innocence and child-like features. This is to compliment the nursery rhyme and again emphasise the fact that what we do will come back and effect our children. Whereas in the car advert a lot of blue and grey is used. This gives connotations of dullness, ice, pollution. This makes the audience think that if they carry on emitting CO2 then our world will become dull and colourless.
The advert almost predicts our future and compels the audience to want to change it. The ‘twinkle twinkle’ advert also predicts the future. It shows a little girl looking outside the window at an almost desert like world, where there is a limp lifeless tree. There is a star above at the top of the advert, looking sad and sorry at the world beneath it. This implies that in the future, there will be nothing to look at, and the world will be a sorry sight , and again forces the audience to become involved in preventing that from happening.
Another technique used in both the ‘twinkle twinkle’ and the car advert is that the science and the facts behind the advert is on the page, but is on the bottom right corner in small print. This gives the effect that even though the science and facts are important, what is more important are our children, and our world. This also makes the whole advert look more attractive. Nobody would look at an advert about CO2 if it was all writing; people would ignore it, whereas if there is an eye-catching yet some-what misleading picture and nursery rhyme a wider range of people would read it.
