The Rest Of Your Fur Coat

The Rest of Your Fur Coat

Advertisements are something we deal with in every single day, and in a modern world, we can not help but be influenced by the messages the ads try to leave in our heads, ultimately influencing our consumer habits. If at all possible, we as a whole would like to try to prevent ourselves from making bad choices based on false premises. Only by strengthening our understanding of what ads are doing can we begin to develop what it takes to become an intelligent consumer.

Advertisements use a variety of methods to manipulate us into purchasing their product or doing what they want us to. In the case of this ad in particular, Peta, the company behind producing the ad, wants you to not purchase a product. The ad is an anti-furs campaign advertisement that features actress Sophie Ellis Bextor in an elegant, black evening dress holding a skinned animal in her hands. The ad is located for online viewing in an online testimonial at http://www.furisdead.com/feat-sophie.asp. The ad is a very simple design at first glance, but if you take a second look, you can see that it has a lot of work put into it with multiple techniques used to keep you from buying a fur. It has been developed to appeal to possible fur buyers and uses basic elements such as its arrangement, colors, appeal, propaganda, and its method of implying the message to the consumer rather than specifically saying it to better accomplish convincing you not to buy.

Since we've noted that the audience for this ad is the possible fur consumers in an effort to prevent them from making such purchases, in that, to be more specific on the intended audience, it would be applying itself towards a lot of the same people the fur ads would in an effort to bring a counter statement contrary to any ad from a company selling furs. The ad would most likely focus on appealing to middle to upper class standing people with a slightly larger focus on the upper class, as those are the most likely to have the money to afford furs in the first place. The aim would probably also be towards ages ranging between people in their mid twenties and mid to late fifties, as apparent by the appeal of the model used in the ad.

It never says its intended purpose, but rather uses the image to relate to you what it means by its statement, "Here's the rest of your fur coat" (Peta). Your mind however is intelligent enough to get their meaning. The animal's dead corpse being held up implies as if the woman is saying the statement. The woman's look and the color scheme used in the ad are what convince you the statement is one made with an angry tone and causes you to relate the message as negative in your mind. We have been brought up learning to understand emotions from people, and the color scheme is defined as "an overall mood" for a piece (Chijiiwa, 11). They understand the consumer will already know about animals and their skin and therefore will get the implication that the ad is making. Ideas and themes stay with you more than words, and in leaving out the words, you grasp the concept intended by the ad better. By drawing the lines yourself, it sinks in and stays with you, leaving the message engraved somewhere in you as well.

Because of this, they are able to use propaganda to help "sell" their meaning. The ad gives uses the propaganda technique black-and-white fallacy, where you are left with only two options. The implied meaning behind this is that the woman, who can represent many important things in our mind, will be upset if we purchase furs. In this, we are faced with two choices, having to decide if we care to have all these forces against us in going against them and buying a fur or to do as the ad says. Transfer propaganda, "a technique of projecting positive or negative qualities (praise or blame) of a person, entity, object, or value (an individual, group, organization, nation, patriotism, etc.) to another in order to make the second more acceptable or to discredit it" is used as the main source of the ad. The whole advertisement in general is based around the concept that buying furs is a negative act. Last, this could also be described as oversimplification too, as the concept of killing innocent animals and killing in general are part of a much larger picture with lots of things that would need to be considered, such as where the fur was attained from, and if it was taken from something that was used as food. In this case, it could be considered just using the rest of an animal and not wasting part of it throwing it away, a concept linked very closely with Native Americans. This concept also makes it more complicated as the entire concept of whether it is right to kill and eat them is debated by some people, and this is just part of why oversimplification propaganda is apparent ("Propaganda").

The ad is arranged with a lot of care and precision intended to both grasp your attention and help enforce their message. It could actually be said that it is a very simple designed ad, with the animal actually being the most detailed thing on the page. Of course, this causes the animal to be more imprinted in your mind than the rest of the ad and therefore leaves the message they want in your head. The composition is also set up so that it leads your eye to the animal. They do this by a simple arrangement of the posing of the words and woman in the ad creating a triangular pattern to keep your eye fixed where they want it. That type of pattern is also one that causes your focus to be allowed to wander around and back to the object while not losing your attention, and in this case helps imply their message and connect the animal to it.

The colors play a major part of this ad from both implying the message and once again grabbing your attention. It uses a basis of warm colors to do so. "Warm colors make a color scheme look brash," as well as "aggressive", and in "books, magazines and posters, they almost always grab out attention" (Chijiiwa, 20). To get their message across as it being negative that the consumer has bought this animal's fur rather than positive, there has to be an implied anger. This is expressed more in this ad through