What the Hail?

     The ad that I am going to talk about in this blog is a television commercial that was released by the beer company Heineken. In this ad a woman is shown taking her friends on a tour of what is assumed to be either a new house or a newly remodeled house. She shows them the living room, then the bedroom and finally she shows them her extremely large walk in closet full of expensive looking clothes, shoes, and handbags. The women are shown screaming and jumping up and down with excitement about the closet when all of a sudden they hear men’s voices screaming as well. The ad then switches to showing a similar group of men standing inside what appears to be a walk in refrigerator full of Heineken beer.

     As stated in the textbook “all media text, all forms of language and representation, carry ideological meanings” (pg.182). This ad shows the stereotypical idea that women only care about clothing, shoes and other materialistic things and that men care about manly things like beer and football etc. This is an example of women simply accepting the ideologies that were placed upon them. As stated in the textbook “if we accept values…then we carry those ideologies as part of who we are” in other words “our personality, our individual identity and our subjectivity have been produced by a number of external factors” (pg.184). In the advertisement I listed as an example both the groups (men and women) have accepted the ideologies that have been presented to them; that women are meant to like clothing and men are meant to like beer. They interpolate these ideologies and they are then expressed in this example.

     

     This ad is aimed at both the men and women by presenting what they believe is important to both genders. It draws the women in by showing the well dressed woman at the beginning taking her friends around her nice new home and by the beautiful closet but then it switches to the men’s same idea of the perfect closet theirs however containing beer instead of expensive clothing.

     

     This ad was extremely successful in representing the norms and values to attract the attention of the buyer. It was able to draw in the attention of both men and women by representing both their believed values (fashion and beer). The women paid attention to the ad because of the beginning and the men paid attention because of the end but either way both men and women’s attention was drawn into this advertisement.

Works Cited:

O’shaughnessy, Michael and Jane Stadler. Media and Society. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press. 2011