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Error-Enallage: intentional grammar
misuse – or in this case, incorrect spelling.
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The company’s name, PLAYSKOOL, uses the spelling error to
emphasize that the company is advertising towards the younger audience. It
grabs the attention of the parents buying the product, like, “hey, this looks
like a fun toy for my preschool aged child!”
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Repetition: the repeating of words to emphasize
a central point.
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This ad uses the word play a lot. “rough
play”, “practice while they play”, and “playing is learning”. This appeals to
the parents because they want for their children to learn, and learn in a way
that is fun.
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Parallelism: similarity in structure in
phrases or clauses.
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“Dressy Bessy” and “Dapper Dan” are easy
names to remember because the words and letters used are so similar. What child,
or even the parents, are going to forget this?
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Color-saturation: the purity or
vividness or depth of a color
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The vividness of the colors on the
clothes and in the diagrams, both on the doll and the girl, draw attention to
how much fun the toy could be. It suggests a fun, happy time to learn. The
girl is also much more colorful that the boy, suggesting gender stereotypes. Girls
get color and variety, boys get browns and greys.
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Perspective- geometric:
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The little girl is in the foreground
and the boy is in the background being slightly covered with the girl’s doll.
Perhaps this is to show that it is more important for girls to know how to
dress well, or that girls will have more interest in playing with a doll. But
it still suggests that both genders are welcome to play/learn.
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Diagonals- balanced:
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Everything in this ad, the words,
diagrams, and logo are centered. The ad looks clean and neat. It crosses over
with the names of the dolls, “Dressy Bessy” and “Dapper Dan”.
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Angle- eye level:
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We are seeing this ad at eye level. It
shows the way the children would be seeing the dolls and shows the parents
the way they will see their children learning/playing,
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Type- style and family
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Bold and condensed type forces the ones
reading it to focus on those parts first. It is saying, “look at me! I am
important!” And the smaller serif type print is giving you an explanation of
why it is so important. And going back to the logo, novelty family, it
implies that this a special kind of children’s toy. Maybe having a comparison
to your own child’s cognitive abilities at the time, and it makes you more
likely to pick it up for your preschool aged child.
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I like your analysis of this ad. I agree with the conclusion that everything is neat, squared away and not too all over the place as if to correlate with the “Dapper Dan”/“Dressy Bessy” emphasis of neatness/self grooming. Additionally, I like how you noticed the emotional “traps” the ad so carefully places. Things that parents will find to be valuable from their childhood or important things they want to instill in their children.
ReplyDeleteIn this ad, the first thing you notice is the female is in a more "upfront" shot than the male. And I think this is something important that needs to be addressed. The female aspect in this ad is something that feel like they are trying to make important, but I feel since it is more of an "up front" topic/ subject, it is even more important that you see the male being played with in the background. I think you should talk about how dolls are typically thought to be played with by females, but in this ad, you have "dapper dan" who is a male and is seen to be played by a male character.
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