среда, 13. април 2011.

Rhetorical Analysis

While looking for an appropriate cartoon to analyse on www.politicalcartoons.com I managed to find one that was quite interesting for me. Since I read online newspaper daily I actually wanted to find a cartoon that portrays the situation that is currently going on in Libya.

The cartoon shows a map of North Africa and Libya in its center. There are three men standing besides the map and one of them  is telling the other two "as you can see, a no-fly zone can protect all the innocent oil, er - I mean people!!". The man who is telling this is in a suit and is probably someone from the United States Cabinet and he is telling this to two army men who will probably be the ones who will execute the order to also bomb Libya. The USA influenced the United Nations and on March 17, 2011 a no-fly zone resolution was imposed on Libya. Soon after this the bombing of Libya started in which US, UK and France were involved but on March 25, the NATO took over everything. 

This cartoon shows the obvious hypocrisy of the American policy which is supposedly worried for the civilians and thats why they imposed the no-fly policy and are bombing the country. However, many around the world argue whether the USA is doing all this in order to protect the Libyan people and many actually claim that the Americans are doing this in order to get the oil. After all, the Americans already this sort of thing with Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.  

In my opinion, John Drakow hit the right place by drawing this cartoon. He wrote what majority of people all around the world is thinking and that is that the USA is using excuses to dictate its own policy and its showing itself as a peacemaker but is actually a big bully.

Cultural Analysis

Every time a company is ready to launch a new product they also have to think about the way in which they would appeal to the public and pursuade the people to buy their products. There are many ways in which an ad can influence the public and get the desired goal - selling the product. Emotions, gender issues, class, sex - all of these can have the effect of buying a certain product. For this assignment I decided to compare two ad campaignes from two worldwide known brands: Chanel and Dior. These two ads have two things in common: they are both ads for perfumes and both parfumes are advertised by a celebrity.

Chanel, a French fashion house founded by Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel who herself said: "simplicity is the key of all true elegance" had Nicole Kidman for this campaign as a spokesperson and simplicity is what defines this ad campaign. Only Nicole Kidman is in the ad and she wears a black dress and LBD or little black dress is basically a trade mark of this fashion house. The ad itself is actually quite modest as Nicole turned her back and is not even watching us. The dress has a low cut on the back and we can see a necklace which has a Chanel pendant. The ad, of course, includes the famous inscription for Chanel No. 5 and a picture of the bottle.

On the other hand, Dior, another French high-fashion company has a completely different approach for their ad campaign. Dior tries to appeal to the public through sex and by doing this the saying "sex sells" really does make sense. In this ad, Chalize Theron, who was named sexiest woman alive by Esquire Magazine in 2007, is looking at us seductively and while doing that she is showing a lot of skin. In fact, with one hand, she is taking of an earing while with the other she is about to strip down her dress. We can also see the memorable "j'adore Dior" inscription and there is, just as in the Chanel ad, a picture of the perfume bottle.

Even though these ads have a different approach they both send the same message: "buy our parfume because Nicole Kidman/Charlize Theron uses it". Many companies use this approach, they use a celebrity to advertise their products and it seems that this is the best approach because, hey, everybody wants to either be Charlize or be with her and apparently, you can to it by buying the perfume she uses.