I wanted to take a quick second to describe an ad that I saw when I was in Greece last year. It will be fairly quick, because I laughed when I saw it, and have been confused by it's message ever since.
Location of the ad is important. It was a 20 foot tall billboard in the middle of the city. Proudly it hung by the acropolis and parthenon, symbols of society and culture for the last 2,500 years, now sullied by this ad.
The ad was fairly simple: A pair of women's breasts which were fairly large in a yellow bikini. In her cleavage rested a packet of cigarettes. When my brother pointed it out to me, we both burst into fits of laughter at the ridiculousness of the ad, it had nothing to do with the cigarettes, the woman was not smoking them.
I have, since then, been trying to figure out the target audience of this ad. Had I been able to understand the Greek underneath, I perhaps would've been able to solve this problem quicker, as a tagline sat underneath the breasts. Here is my confusion though: Is this ad telling women that if they smoke these cigarettes, they will have breasts like this, which is physically impossible? Or are they telling men that if they smoke these cigarettes they will get to sleep with women who look like this? Or, that men only want to be with women that have large breasts and smoke this brand of cigarette? Or even, that this is the cigarette for women with big breasts. I have puzzled it over in my head for a while, and I can't figure it out. Both seem like very "valid" ways of advertising. Indeed in the film, Killing Us Softly, disembodiment is one of the central ideas in advertising: "we don't need to see the face, just the body", as the filmmaker says, because that is all that it is important.
Now that I think about it more and more, I realize that this ad shouldn't be funny, and my brother and I shouldn't have laughed when we saw it. Now that I understand the power that the media has, and what that ad taught people looking at it. It would've poisoned people's brains into killing themselves in an attempt to look beautiful. What was once the center of progress and democracy in the world is now home to these. Yet, I suppose this shouldn't surprise me, as the current centers of progress and democracy are full of these images as well.
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