The advert I am going to analyse is for a product called Calvin Klein ‘Dirty Denim’. The advert is based on denim clothing. It is an advertised using hip hop superstar Ja Rule. I found this advertisement on the internet and I believe the target audience to be teenagers to people in the early thirties. My analysis will be broken down into sections and I will analyse each subdivision at a time. I think the advertisement is very intriguing and the publishers of this advert use very clever techniques to promote and effectively sell this product.
The use of Ja Rule to advertise this product helps the manufacturers sell it because Ja Rule is known world-wide to the target audience. He is an international superstar for his work in the music industry, specifically in hip hop, which is also listened to world-wide by the target audience. He has released songs with big names including Jennifer Lopez and his tracks are also sold world-wide. He has a fine but different fashion sense, making him a teenage boy’s ‘style icon’. This ‘style icon’ status helps him and Calvin Klein influence teenagers fashion ideas, which is another good reason why he was chosen to promote these particular items of clothing.
Using my ideas within my preceding paragraph, I can understand how Calvin Klein’s advertising department have used Ja Rule’s image and status to pin-point the high-quality clothing on sale. With the usage of Ja Rule wearing the clothing being promoted in the advert, people are instantly manipulated into believing that “if it’s good enough for him, it must be good enough for me”. Therefore people believe that they can wear these items of clothing without the worry of being told the clothing is ‘unfashionable’.
Also, the usage of two items of clothing, supposedly both from the same ‘Dirty Denim’ range, helps Calvin Klein to promote not only the one piece of clothing, but to promote the whole range. As well as this, they are trying to persuade the customer to buy both items as by looking at the advertisement and Ja Rule, they are trying to tell the customer that the two items go well together. But by using this selling technique of promoting two different items in the same advert, it perhaps manipulates the reader to believe as far as the jeans being ‘incomplete’ without the jacket as well.
The usage of the large font and gold lettering is a good way to sell the product as the big letters are easier to remember. Also, using CK is a better idea than using the full name of Calvin Klein as people only need to remember the two letters. Gold symbolises ‘the best’ or ‘excellence’, and using the gold lettering for the trader’s name suggests to the reader that this particular brand or range is ‘the best’. The setting of the advert almost portrays a relaxed and calm atmosphere, possibly even ‘heavenly’. It shows Ja Rule perhaps praying, or thanking god. This could be taken by the readers as Ja Rule thanking god that he has these ‘superb’ clothes, which would again add to the marketing power of the product range.
The style of the advert is different to other adverts. Usually, adverts have text with perhaps a slogan or a short sentence or paragraph along the lines of “This product IS the best”. But this advert only contains the brand and the range names, leaving the setting and the celebrity to do all the marketing work. This strategy is very hard to pull off, as the actual setting and celebrity must accommodate for the loss of marketing power from the text. But I believe this strategy has worked, with the actual image being eye-catching, leaving the consumers thinking about what the image is saying.
