Deconstruct an Advertisement

You’re surrounded. Totally surrounded by ads. On your phone, your computer, on the bus and on billboards, in magazines. These ads are each trying to make you buy something, or even need something, to feel like you aren’t good enough without it. Welcome to the world of advertising.

Deconstructing an ad means figuring out how it’s trying to manipulate you. When you can take it apart and look at the ways an ad is designed, why it looks the way it does, what kind of feeling it’s trying to create in you — then you can be more free it, not easily tricked, able to make your own choices. See more below, and listen to the podcast for an example.

Getting Started: Start with an ad that really catches your attention. Something visual is easiest to begin with, so maybe an online ad or something in a magazine. Make sure you have it in front of you, perhaps by taking a screen shot if it’s online, so you can really look closely and dissect it. With the ad in front of you, try asking these questions and see what you begin to notice:

If there are people shown in the ad, what do you notice about them? For example, their body type, their clothing, the color of their skin, the expression on their faces?
If you were the designer of the ad, why would you have chosen this kind of person for the ad? How was that person supposed to get your attention?
How do you think the ad designer wanted you to feel?
What messages does this person’s appearance give about gender, race, or money? Which assumptions are made?
What receives the most visual space? Is it the product itself, or something else? Why?
What kind of person do they want you to think buys this product/service?

Let’s take an example. Imagine an ad that shows a handsome man riding a horse, looking tan, rugged, and happy, and holding a cigarette in his hands. This is a classic ad from cigarette companies, used to get millions of people to start smoking. If we look closely at it, what is this ad trying to express?

“People who smoke cigarettes are happy and strong”

“If you want to be a manly man, you should smoke cigarettes too”

“Real men love the outdoors, and as you can see here, being a real man means smoking cigarettes”

If we aren’t careful, we just take this ad in as part of the background, and each time we see it, it makes us a little more likely to think “real men smoke cigarettes.” Of course, if we stop and look at this, it is a nonsensical statement. Smoking cigarettes has nothing to do with being strong and happy - in fact it is more likely to lead to the opposite result!

Try this with a few ads you see coming up often in your life, and see if you can get underneath the manipulation, find out what they’re trying to convince you of, and ask yourself if it actually makes any sense.

Here are some sample ads to try this with: