The fact that all the adverts are set in hot and/or steamy places denotes that they are excitable places and the connotations of these being that wearing Levi’s Jeans will make you feel hot, steamy, sexy, and excitable. Using hot, steamy, and at times exotic places in the Levi’s advertisements makes the audience think that by wearing Levi’s their lives will be transformed into something similar to what is being shown in the commercial.
The above connotations also help prove their main method of appeal, which is sex and even nudity to a certain extent. There are always constant close ups of underwear and human flesh and this is what gives the audience connotations of sex. The effect of this on the audience will be that if they wear Levi’s they will become sexy. For example one of the advertisements (number 10) is set on the beach and a dog is set to guard the man’s pair of Levi’s jeans, a woman wearing a bikini comes and puts the jeans on and when the man comes back from his swim in the ocean he is attracted to the woman, partly because she is wearing the jeans and partly because of the way she looks. The man is also wearing only his swimming trunks and this prove the point of nudity being used. This advertisement uses the connotations that nearly all Levi’s adverts use, these being the use of sex as their main method of appeal to give connotations of being and felling sexy in Levi’s.
We decided to make our own advertising campaigns because Levi’s Jeans have a target audience of only whit young people. This means that their advertisement would not appeal to a wider range of people that come from a range of different backgrounds. Because ethnic and racial equality is so important, it was one of our main aims to make our advertisement so that it would suit a target audience of teenagers that are from various different cultures.
The basic location of our film advertisement was set in a nightclub. There were many young people dancing, and the music was meant to be fairly loud. The characters that played parts in our film advert were very different from the Levi’s advertisements because our characters were very obviously from different ethnic origins and the location of the advert was meant to be a place that teenagers can relate to fairly easily.
In the film advertisement a girl walks into the nightclub wearing a gorgeous, sexy-looking, red dress, she tries to attract the attention of one of the boys there but he does not seem to be interested. Angrily she leaves the club, returns wearing a pair of jeans, the music stops, and everyone is suddenly in awe of the girl’s casual fashion. The other people that were present at the club give the girl admiring glances and the boy whose attention she was previously trying to get walks towards her. The girl who now thinks she is very special ignores him and goes for another boy that was at the club.
The basic storyline of our advertisement is appropriate for our target audience because it is something that they are always trying to do. (Attract the opposite sex)
The connotations of the smart red dress that the girl was wearing the first time she entered the club are meant to be feminine, sexy, and daring. The fact that she does not get the boys attention wearing the dress proves that jeans are more feminine, sexy, and daring than a dress.
The name for our brand of jeans was Zodiac. We chose this name because many teenagers believe in horoscopes and mystery. A name like Zodiac would influence the target audience because it would make them think that buying the jeans would have a positive effect on their fate.
Our logo was the sun because it has got links with the name and because sun signs play an equal part of horoscopes. The sun also has connotations like hot and powerful. Having the sun as our logo and Zodiac as our name, the jeans are given an aura of mystery. This would appeal to the target audience because as teenagers they are still discovering themselves so mystery in a way would aggregate up some of their feelings.
The colours used on the poster tie in with the zodiac theme because the main background colour is yellow. One of the main reasons we chose this colour was so that it would liven up the jeans as it is and eye-catching and bright colour.
Our slogan was “casual yet classy” because in the film advertisement this is what effect the jeans have on the audience. Also a slogan like this would make people buy the jeans because it is the sort of look that a vast majority of teenagers prefer.
In our film advertisement we used no talking like all the Levi’s adverts because we thought this to be very effective as it makes the audience concentrate more on what is going on rather than on what is being said.
The effect we wanted our poster to have on the audience was something eye-catching and attractive to look at, and when they did look it in more detail to make them aware of the look that they could achieve: “Casual yet classy”
In comparison with the Levi’s advertisements, I think that our advertising campaign was better because Levi’s adverts don’t always use “normal” situations; this makes their advertisements unappealing. It is unappealing because if the target cannot relate to the common idea they will have no interest in the advertisement or the jeans. Also the characters that were used in Levi’s advertisements were always white, young and very attractive people. This is unrealistic all the time because not everyone is perfect and it was one of our main aims to make our advert realistic and true. By using normal people from different cultures helped us make our advertisement more genuine.
Even though the target audience of the Levi’s advertisements is not the same as ours some of their advertisements are still not interesting or engaging. An example of an advert like this is advertisement number 11, which is set in Russia. In this advert it was not clear what was going on and the slogan was also in Russian. This meant that if the target viewers were not literate in Russian the advert would mean practically nothing, they would not understand it.
The main method of appeal in Levi’s advertisements is sex, obviously this would not appeal to teenagers because they are too young. While coming up with ideas on what are advert would consist of we were aware of the fact that even though teenagers are not as interested in sex as an act they still want to attract the opposite sex. Using this we made the main method of appeal in our advertisement attracting the opposite sex. Even though the main method of appeal in both advertisements is similar they are still very different. Our main method of appeal is something that teenagers can relate to more easily.
The characters that we used in our advertisement are very different from the people used in Levi’s adverts because the people in our advert are realistic and have different ethnic backgrounds. The storyline of our advert could be altered so that it would attract the target audience of Levi’s adverts but because we do not have close – ups of human flesh and underwear the main method of appeal has changed and the target audience respectively.
In conclusion, I would say that there are different advertisements that appeal to different people and the main reason for this being that everyone has different interests, likes and dislikes. For example a target audience that is aged between 22 and 27 would be attracted to the Levi’s adverts because they are interested in sex and can relate to that sort of stuff. Whereas on the other hand teenagers aged between 14 and19 would be attracted to our advert because they can relate to our theme and ideas.
Because the target audience for Levi’s adverts was young people that are white and in their early twenties the adverts were made accordingly. The same goes for our advertisement it was made with our target audience in mind so it would not appeal to white people in their early twenties and the Levi’s adverts would not appeal to us.
