Visual Analysis
Advertising is a key essential to making a product known. “Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.” Mark Twain said this in his lifetime that occurred between the years 1835 and 1910. Even though he said this in a time when advertisements were much different from what they are now, it is rational to say that his belief can be said about advertisement today. Advertisement has been a key component to selling a product for a very long time. A couple of the key factors that go into the structure of an advertisement are how the designer uses gender and society to connect the ad with the consumer. In the chosen ad, we see five shirtless men wearing Tommy Hilfiger pants, with two children also wearing Tommy Hilfiger clothes, but that is not all there is to the ad. There are many things that go into making an ad truly great. When you incorporate gender and society into an ad, it can make the ad much more relatable to a wider audience based on the figures, color, or any other parts incorporated in the ad.
In the ad, we see five men who seem to be around their mid-20’s. There is diversity within the group of men through skin tone, but they all share the characteristic of having a fit, masculine body. Each man is shown with strong, muscular abs, broad shoulders, and tone biceps. This makes the ad much more interesting to a wide audience, an audience that could consist of women, men, anybody really. Angelo Siciliano, an Italian immigrant who moved to the United States in 1910 at the age of 10 with is parents, became famous for marketing his muscles in local ads (Black 7). Siciliano grew up as a skinny, scrawny kid who had little muscle definition, as well as not being able to speak a work of English. “ He didn't look like much, either. Skinny and slope-shouldered, feeble and often ill, he was picked on by bullies in the Brooklyn neighborhood where his family had settled, and his own uncle beat him for...