May9

Montana MayMarch 30, 2015Ashley HumphriesENC 1101Lady and the BieberFor many reasons Mercedes-Benz is a well-respected car dealership, it has been in business for 125 years and has done very well given select rough times. But based on some distinct advertisements Mercedes has begun to tint their name. They promote their Brake Assist PLUS by targeting certain people to use in their advertisements.While picking apart this advertisement I discovered clichs and insults to women, but more specifically older women. This is not tolerable, and could be influencing people to buy their cars for the wrong reasons. But does it actually appeal to the older audience it seems to be demeaning? In a way yes, because it promotes their safety, which is a lot of peoples number one priority. But, they could have advertised in a better way and still sent the same message across.Why did Mercedes ultimately bother with assuring that the older woman had grey hair, or prominently show her wrinkles? Mercedes ties this image in with the text at the bottom left of the ad displaying125! Years, but could that just be a reference to her age and not the companies longevity? Because as you finish the statement it says of innovation which then clearly has nothing to do with the womans age, but it is more transparent than the rest and harder to see. So people at that advanced age would have a harder time seeing that, and if they cannot see the rest of the message they may get offended even though they are the ones you are trying to reach. These are all circumstances that point to the exact claim that she is older and therefore now needs assistance with her driving. But is that necessarily true? Or is it just a shrewd way for the car company to show that their Brake Assist can help anyone at any age? This plays on the prominent feature of sexism and age discrimination.By the car company deliberately choosing a woman to be portrayed with their Brake Assist PLUS program, they are relying on the fact that women have a reputation for being worse drivers than men and therefore they are exploiting sexism by saying, look we finally invented a car that even women can have a fast reflex time in, even though its not really theirs and its just the car doing it for them!. As for the age discrimination they are suggesting that more specifically older women need the help more than anyone else otherwise they would have put that group of people on their instead.Even apart from her physical appearance, what she is wearing also suggests something. Her shoe is a main focus. The heel looks sophisticated and classy suggesting she does take care of herself and has money. This message alters the audience as well because it suggests that if you dress and present yourself a certain way and then you are able to drive the car. Its almost as if your class will earn it for you. In addition the heel is open toed which shows off her femininity rather than being in a closed toed shoe that conceal her toes like mens wear. As for the font, it appears to be straight forward and no frills to support the feminine aspect of the picture, but the white color does suggest innocence which women often represent compared to men. But, the simplicity of the message is also quite shocking, because it seems to be a great invention that should require a little more explaining. But, since there is a woman on it maybe not so much. The advertisers want to put a basic sentence, on a basic ad, with a basic lesson, that anyone can be helped with this car. For this reason, you could easily relate the simplicity of the message to the simplicity of a woman and driving a car. Furthermore, the color scheme of the ad was very limited to grey hues, and off whites, except for her scarf which is draped around her neck as an accessory, this is the only color present. The rest simply blend together such as the crme colored shoe, grey background, and the womans grey hair. Seeing the matching throughout the ad this can also relay back to women as a whole as well because of fashion.The fashion industry is predominantly women organized and operated, so with the accent of the scarf and close matching of the background colors one gets a strong sense of style and a particular eye for the scheme. Suggesting a womens touch with the matching and color layout.Throughout the feminizing layers the ad is ultimately successful. It shows how the Brake Assist program can lower your reaction time with a figure, and shows that it can provide safety for those that cannot always provide it to themselves all the time. In this case it would be the older woman. And the advertisers know this, and they think that if they can show an older person being safe who would ultimately want it? Their children. Because the children of the parents want them to be safe and well taken care of when theyre not around, just as they were to them when they were younger. So the marketers know this and show it to the next generation as a way of saying thank you to their parents for everything they have done. Then when they see that their parents are safe in it, they too may want it for themselves or if they have children old enough to drive, one for them to keep them safe on the road as well. Basically allowing the Brake Assist to become a safety trend, which allows success to the program and persuades people to buy their cars because thats where they know that they can find that feature, rather than try to go and find it somewhere else.But what happens when the sensors fade, or the reaction is too delayed? They give us no information on that. And how accurate is the reaction time for the vehicle compared to an alert human being? Though they suggest it is very fast by the diagram of the altered body they never say an exact number, nor do they say how it can be repaired when it breaks, or if it has ever not worked in an emergency. And because they give no hint to doubt about their product people fail to question it, and continue to purchase it without a second thought. This is how their advertisement works for them but fails the audience all at once.To contradict what they are saying I went to the complete opposite end of the human spectrum and countered an older woman with a young and very naive teenage boy. This is clearly my main spoofing point for the basic fact that the boy is Justin Bieber. But it is not the image that is the focus for my anti-advertisement, it is instead the words next to it. Shorten your reaction time to less than his attention span. Brake Assist PLUS. And I promise there is a joke in there.As the main part of the ad I focused on the irony and true stereotype that has been proven multiple times, which is that teenage boys have the highest insurance and are most likely to be involved in car crashes. So to enhance these aspects further I left the background color as grey and kept the main features, such as the placement of the text and the type of picture it was (the head to the foot) so when people read it now they can focus on the differences because they can easily see how they are similar. For this I feel it is an effective way to get my message out clearer and more efficiently, than if I was to change a lot about the ad then people would be stuck wondering how they related to each other.

For this advertisement I feel as though I am allowing the audience to focus on the real reason they want this car, its not to protect someone from themselves but to protect their loved ones from other people around them. But, in a way the car company had a good idea with shortening the reaction time but not because the people who were driving were old or a woman, its because there are a lot of inexperienced drivers around them such as Bieber who was racing, dinking, and driving. Which also describes a lot of teens in America unfortunately, and some who arent teen-like anymore, and for this reason my audience has slightly shifted from just grown adults with older parents and or younger children, to those who just care about their families in general no matter who they are to them, but instead because they want them to be safe.The reasoning incorporated into my anti-advertisement was to enhance the parody of the situation by having a well-known celebrity who had a rough driving record and who was reasonably younger to contradict the older woman in the original. To further emphasize the contradiction between the original and anti-advertisement I chose to redo the slogan from Shorten you reaction time. Brake Assist PLUS. To, Shorten your reaction time to less than his attention span. Brake Assist PLUS. This plays on the humor view of the advertisement because just as the older woman has a clich, so do teenage boys with their notoriously minimal attention span.

For the subtext I left the number of years allowing the audience to give Mercedes-Benz the respect it deserves for surviving that long, however by altering the next part of the accomplishment I brought back the humor and connected to the picture yet again. The background and font are still the same though, because I wanted to change the message, not the advertisement itself nor the origination of it.To achieve the most relatable message as possible the sentence was generic and most can identify its origination from the clich. As a whole the advertisement was successful at reaching a wide audience and kept exemptions to a minimum, to allow as many connections as possible. As for Mercedes, they introduced many technological and safety innovations over the years. However, they have introduced innovations that have gone on to be replicated by other brands, (Bhasin). Because people are interested in cars with more to offer than just a drive this is why they attempted to sell their audience the idea of the Brake Assist, but the company went about it an offensive way. Then when they mentioned that they have been established for over 125 years the company wanted to show the potential buyers that they were buying a var with a history for which it has implemented over the years to establish itself as a leader in the fiercely competitive automobile industry.With the background knowledge of the advertisement it does not seem as offensive, but when most people glance at it momentarily they do not understand the full value for what it is worth. For this reason Mercedes needs to alter their campaign for the Brake Assist PLUS and incorporate every clich or none at all.

Citations:

1. Kutzler, Hannes. GRETA. Advertolog Advertising and Commercials. Switzerland. June 2011. Web. 30 March 2015.2. Bhasin, Hitesh. Marketing mix of Mercedes-Benz. Marketing91. N.p, n.d. Web 3 April 2015.

Throughout this class I have grown remarkably as a writer and thinker. My thought processes are deeper and more unique to my topic instead of generic as they were before. Enrolling in this class will help me throughout my life and future career to communicate better with others through the written language. Additionally this course has taught me how to properly address and identify the audience of my work no matter what the topic or the type of readers I may encounter.This process of becoming a more advanced writer was characterized by many different aspects of writing from the radio essay to the anti-advertisement, and each paper had its own set of differences it wanted to explore through writing, and if used correctly these newly learned skills would be useful in any assignment and life. To further explain, the technology assignment was meant for us (the students) to discover ourselves and what has shaped us over the course of our life. This allowed us to be introduced to a deeper thinking and evaluate who we are as a person and why we are that way. For this I choose the radio after initially doing the assignment completely wrong. To begin I choose multiple technologies and how I have went from one to the next, completely missing the point of the assignment to narrow it down to just one instead of three like I had. So with the first conference I confirmed to myself that this class was going to be similar to a very long-lasting shot. For the fact that I have to take it so I might as well get it over with now and just do it (and no I did not just quote Nike). So I restarted my essay to only include one source of technology which would be the radio, and I attempted, again, to write my essay. With this set back I realized that I need to reevaluate the way I was analyzing prompts and interpreting them because I could not afford to do five drafts per assignment instead of just four. Resulting with me still miscalculating the point of the next paper, although this one was not as catastrophic. As a result for the next assignment I began with knowingly admitting that I may slip up and summarize a few sentences in the Dr. Seuss book The Sneetches, but I never imagined messing up my explanation and organization of the book in my essay. So again, another milestone I must cross to complete my paper and try to pass the class successfully. My next attempt was slightly better than the previous but still not as developed as I had hoped for, so now rather than focusing on the topic and how I was reading it, I focused on how I was reading and interpreting my essay as an outsider, and to be fair it was a mess of confusion. I had quickly discovered that most probably do not know or remember the story of the Sneetches, nonetheless know it enough in detail to understand my essay without me readdressing the plot. That was my first major mistake I had to change, because if the reader does not initially understand what is occurring or being discussed in the paper, you could be one hundred percent right but the reader would never know so it would never matter anyway. Following the explanation mistake I had to also alter the organization pattern so it flowed with textual support and visual support instead of one and then the next. For this I reordered my body paragraphs so they connected with each other in the sequence of the plot, so if the reader did not quite understand the story to the full extent then they could still follow the paper rather easily. Then I added visuals throughout the paper to assist the readers in imagining what was occurring throughout the story itself, because since the characters are not real I find it very beneficial to included pictures so the audience can have an idea of what to visualize as they read the essay.As for the last paper, this was a creative stump for me as a writer and as a student. Giving us free range to develop an anti-advertisement to contrast the original would have been comprehensible if we were given the advertisement with some outlines of ideas. But completely allowing us to choose our own and create the anti-advertisement was an obstacle I had a very difficult time overcoming. I could not find an advertisement that I deemed deep enough to compose an entire paper from, and while others seemed to magically find the perfect ones I was left with nothing but worry and defeat. Finally I tried settling on an advertisement that was absurd and disgusting for an energy drink whose name is not appropriate whatsoever. So neither was my anti-ad, which was a huge mistake because I could only write about five hundred words from it and then run out. So I threw away that draft (Deja vu).Then comes my current advertisement which I stumbled upon and was not even planning on doing until I watched The Roast of Justin Bieber on MTV and was slammed by inspiration. His one joke for him hitting a pedestrian with his car is what sparked my fire for this anti-advertisement. And though it is still remotely peculiar it has given me a lot to talk about which is precisely what I needed. So with this essay I began incorporating my knowledge of the joke but forgot that not everyone who would have seen this anti-ad would have understood the reference, so that began the change of word choice and direction of my essay as a whole. But, soon enough I briefly described Justin Bieber and his relevance to the advertisement but stayed away from the background knowledge of the joke so my audience would have an easier time comprehending what I was saying. This took multiple tries to achieve because I had to change my perspective form the writer who created the advertisement and who knew one side of the reason to an audience who was trying to interpret it for the first time. For this reason it was difficult for me to create this essay but eventually I reached far enough away from my previous knowledge so the average person who happened to see the picture would understand what I was trying to achieve. So I went with the most obvious of outcomes, I talked about how he possessed a teenage boys attention span which is known to be minute as women are known to be worse drivers than men, and this then transformed into my final draft.For me each draft serves as a stepping stone through the writing process and with every step I become closer and closer to the destination of an essay I am looking for. This process of write and revise allows me to make subtle changes that overtime alter the essay as a whole, but for the better. So instead of overwhelming myself with one draft and then constant revising my own revisions this makes it more clearly cut and approachable as a writer. This is genuinely one of the best tactics I have learned for writing.Lastly, as my audience travels through the website they will come across quotes on the left and right side of the picture which I chose the represent the paper or a difficulty I experienced with it. The quote on the left is a real quote, where as the one on the right side is my version and I have addressed it to who I feel is likely to gain the most from it or I have written what it addresses such as Life for the reflection quote. This is a visual representative to which I see fit to explain the paper and generalize what the topic wanted us to discuss. To explain this further with paper one my struggle was the thinking of what influenced me and how, I was having a difficult time gathering ideas. So for the image I showed a thought process and for the quote I used We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them as quoted by Albert Einstein. This helps to express the process by which I had to edit my paper to better fit the topic and how I had to alter my sense of mind to achieve the paper I needed. But, for the right side I changed it so instead of the quote relating to only me I altered it to We cant edit a paper by using the same kind of thinking we used to create it and I related it to all writers instead of putting my name, because I believe that most would say the same thing. As I mentioned earlier these skills I have learned in class can translate to almost anywhere, which is why I demonstrated my new found knowledge of addressing audiences by altering the quotes to better suite them, no matter who they are.