Ad Analysis

This ad focuses on the appeal of flawless, perfect skin. The first thing that catches your eye in the ad is the woman’s face. The headline is purposely put in a clear color that resembles the girl’s skin. By putting emphasis on the idea of clear skin, it automatically makes the viewer feel self-conscious about their own skin, making them automatically serious about the flawless skin providing product.

            Both the background and the girl’s attire are very plain. They are also both dark in color, creating a huge contrast with the pale, flawless skin. When actually looking at the woman’s skin, we can see just how unrealistically perfect it is. Her nose even seems to blend into her face, making it almost disappear. She has no normal pigment variation, making it even more obvious that the photo is photoshopped. By creating such perfect, porcelin skin the ad further makes the reader needy to achieve such perfection by buying the product.

 The ad claims that being a pushover means allowing acne or facial flaws to happen. The warrant is that by using this product, you won’t be a pushover. The product itself is a play on words. The title of the product claims that by using it you will in fact be a proactive person, which is deemed desirable.  Avril Lavinge is seen as a “rocker” or “bad-ass” apparently. This makes her a perfect candidate for the “non-pushover” of acne. Overall, the headline works to create an image of toughness and strength. From this, we can assume that having acne makes someone weak and a “pushover”.

It can be assumed by simply looking at this ad that appearance is extremely important to the audience. The woman in the ad has perfect, porcelain skin, healthy looking hair and is overall, attractive. By using a celebrity as the model, the audience has someone to look up to who they feel they can trust. Because Avril Lavine uses this product, I should too. 

Nirvana vs. The Beatles

My friend Nic is a music fanatic, just like me. We usually like the same types of music but when a disagreement arises, the conversation usually becomes heated pretty quickly. The other night we were listening to the Beatles White Album when I announced that I thought that the Beatles are one of the most influential bands to have ever existed. Just with that remark, it was on. Nic instantly shot back, “Nirvana is the most influential band, what are you talking about?” From there, things got a little ugly, which made it the perfect argument to discuss in this blog.

The argument all began with a claim. My claim was that the Beatles are the most influential band ever, while Nic’s claim was that Nirvana held the trophy for most influential. My position on the issue was obvious, I felt that the Beatles influenced a generation and that their music still exists and is recognized in the world today. Nic felt that Nirvana created the punk genre and that they crossed a generation gap unlike any other band has before. My initial impulse when the argument began was to try and immediately shut Nic down and prove that I was right. To do so, I began using logical fallacies to make me look smarter (even though none of what I said truly helped the argument). The argued, “Their was a musical show in Las Vegas all about the Beatles, so they must be more influential”. Nic argued back with evidence about how many albums Nirvana has sold and used a warrant that Nirvana’s music was overall “better” that the Beatles. I countered with another fallacy attacking Nic’c character “You don’t even know what real music is, so how would you know if Nirvana is better or not?” I then went on to create an analogy..that was completely and utterly b.s. I said, “ The Beatles are created basically created music. They are the God of the entire music world”. With that statement, the argument was basically over because we both realized how stupid we sounded.

The strengths in this argument were probably our verbal back and forth. We never interrupted each other and we let each other get our points across. However, our weaknesses were that we didn’t really use any true techniques that would benefit our proving our claims. Ethos, pathos and logos would have definitely helped to develop our argument further.