Conversations Beyond the Classroom (Eng 100O): Ad Analysis

Welcome!

Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Conversations Beyond the Classroom”! The title of this blog refers to the community of active readers & collaborative learners we are creating by sharing our academic writing for Eng 100 with each other + a larger group of students, instructors, academics, and just about anybody who chooses to follow our blog! When you write and post your reader responses here (and, later, as you write your essays for the course), I encourage you to use this audience to conceptualize who you are writing for and, most important, how to communicate your ideas so that this group of academic readers and writers can easily follow your line of thinking. Think about it this way: What do you need to explain and articulate in order for the other bloggers to understand your response to the essays we’ve read in class? What does your audience need to know about those essays and the authors who wrote them? And how can you show your readers, in writing, which ideas you add to these “conversations” that take place in the texts we study?

As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! We encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later…).

Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. We hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it! I am really excited see how far we can take this together!

--Mary Hammerbeck, Instructor of Eng 100

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Ad Analysis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7i0JEOeSEP0

Captain Morgan Bar Ad

When I came across this commercial for the first time it automatically made me laugh, it’s a commercial that I always remembered. It pretty much portrays a usual American scene with many different types of people lounging at a bar. In the bar is a pretty average man, he wanted a night out with his buddies, lied to his wife to get out of one of her family functions, unaware of the possibility of him getting caught. Up to a certain point all is going well until this average guy’s wife calls him on his night out with his buddies, obviously she is out of town and is not aware of his whereabouts. Instantly everyone in the bar seems to realize this and come to his rescue (which I did not expect at all) by making various amounts of noises and playing out scenes, as if to make it seem he were doing nothing but simply watching television.

This commercial is advertising a brand of beer; it’s pretty much directed more towards male viewers. It gives off the impression that every guy should “Be a Man.” In this case that would be finding a fast easy way out of the sticky situation, which this guy accomplishes quite well. At the end it states its advertising line “Got a little Captain in you?” I think the message sent out by that is the guts or rush each male would suddenly get after buying or drinking that certain brand of beer- everything will just fall into place.

In his essay, Scholes states “Teach contemporary students to discern and analyze the messages in video texts that reinforce myths that can be harmful.” And “Either way they offer us what is perhaps the greatest single virtue of art: change from normal, a defense against the ever-present threat of boredom.” This relates to the video text I chose because this commercial, at least for me, took away about two more minutes I would have spent in the state of total boredom! It was one of the only commercials I actually stopped texting during to watch during that five minute break. This Ad isn’t just selling beer, but in a way it is selling manly hood. As for me though, since I am not a male I cannot say but if I were, I still don’t know if it would compel me to buy rather than give me a good laugh because all the acting by the rest of the crowd was just so abnormal. Definitely not an everyday scene at the bar I’m assuming!

1 comment:

Amanda SinghSeptember 30, 2010 at 2:14 PM
By: Amanda and Anoop:
Question: 2
This ad hopes the viewer, as in male, will surrender to the "captain in themselves". Meaning the man in themselves. The gap in this ad is the myth that drinking a certain brand of beer will allow you to save yourself from an unwanted situation or be smart enough to come up with a plan to get you out.

Question: 7
People left out of this commercial are children and varying racial ethnicitys. Also the people portrayed in the ad all seemed to have a middle class appearance.
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Practice Introductory Post, Please!

Please Post an Introduction (for practice) by Monday, Sept. 22nd so that we can all be prepared for the first blog post assignment coming up next Thursday.

Here's what to do:

Once you've accepted the invitation to become a contributor to this blog, you will notice a "new post" tab at the top of our blog. Click on that and enter your text. (I suggest you first type in a MW doc and then copy and paste to our blog to minimize the risk of losing your work.) Then, post!

For your first post, please:

Write a brief informal introduction of yourself. Say whatever you’d like about yourself to us—your audience & collaborative learners. Check out Mary’s introduction if you need some ideas about what to say about yourself.