While doing research for a group project in another class, I was scouring the internet for advertisements done by some of the biggest companies in America. Whenever I think of an American based company that is extremely successful with unique and and intriguing advertising, I think of Apple. While they have produced commercials that appeal so a variety of different people and used many different techniques to do so, one commercial really stuck out to me.

With the release of the iPhone 4, came the new concept of FaceTime. This advertisement focuses on a commonplace in America, which that technology can solve social problems. We constantly text and update our statuses, so of course we are going to believe that this new technology will help bridge a distance gap.

This commercial also has a strong emotional appeal to it, because this is showing they it has more use than just a teenager using it. It shows how it can be used to bring families closer together, even when they are far away. The use of the baby of course pulls on your heart strings and because the grandfather is getting to see his granddaughter for the first time with the use of this amazing new technology.

Apple does not need to prove any credibility in this commercial because it is already a well trusted company that is know to produce high-quality products to consumers. They felt no need to include how fast this new phone is or how highly desirable it is, everyone already knows that. Instead they focus on how it can make parts of your life better that aren’t stereotypical of a cell-phone company. This is a very unique approach that I believe is very successful because it is so different and unexpected. Instead of the stereotypical commercial putting emphasis how clear the image of the screen is, you are more focused on how it will change your life.

For my TED Talk, I will be talking about how beauty pageants teach girls to focus their self-worth around beauty.

I plan on focusing the beginning of my talk about my personal childhood and stories from my own life about how I was raised and the things that I was taught to value while growing up. I’ll use these funny stories in order to connect and relate to the audience. I want everyone to feel as though I am talking directly to them so that they can relate to what I’m saying.

I plan on using some pretty powerful visuals, such as a before and after picture of a girl participating in a pageant. I also think that it would be extremely useful to put some of the statistics that I say out loud in plain black text with a white background. The transformation picture of the child will definitely be a good example of how I will use pathos because it will definitely create negative emotions and support the main point that I will be trying to get across. The plain black text with the white background will also help to show the importance of the words that they are both hearing and reading, but they will be short and simple enough not to draw the audience away for too long. The simplistic structure is how I include logos in my visual aids because I want to be able to get the point that I am trying to make across as fast as possible. I might try to use the “backbone” alignment and see how everything looks with that. I also might try and use a powerful statistic with a picture so that the audience can clearly see the impact that the fact I just told them actually has.

As I was trying to make an attempt at brainstorming my paradigm shift essay, I of course ended up on Facebook. As I was multitasking between creeping on random people and watching 19 Kids and Counting, I came across a really interesting bandwagon-esq advertisement promoting positive self-image.

I find this very interesting because it focuses on both self image and the image of others.

One thing that really stuck out to me was the ethos of how the poster was set up. It definitely projects the feeling that it had been professionally designed and the little logo in the bottom right-hand corner draws my attention and gives me a sense of legitimacy. I actually kind of trusted this post right away and wanted to believe whatever it was telling me.

The next thing that I noticed was the pathos of the advertisement. If you read the text before the picture, there are phrases that every girl says and that every girl hears. We know the negative feelings that come with those words being said. When the rest of the post says to stop saying those things, it is extremely relatable because we don’t like saying those things in the first place! I think it is very effective in its attempt to draw the audience in and also successful in making them want to actually participate.

It also places strong importance on the commonplace of the importance of body image to women. That is the true draw of this advertisement. If women can relate to this on such a personal level, they are bound to pay attention.

I think it would be extremely interesting to do my essay on the shift in image on “the typical white girl”. With an increase of the focus on social media in recent years, I think this brought about a change in the image of girls. I also believe that there has been a increase in the importance placed on brand names and how they change how a person if viewed, based in which brands they are affiliated with. Girls constantly post pictures of themselves with their Starbucks coffee and their vineyard vines sweatshirt, but why do people care whether or not you are drinking Starbuck? Why don’t we post pictures with coffee from a gas station? I think because social media allows girl to constantly be projected to the world, they are more conscious of what people think about them because what they project to the world is how they will be viewed in society. While I think this has been a subtle shift, I really do think that it is a significant cultural change.

Where does this idea exist within society?

When did it become an obvious part of society?

Is it viewed as a positive of negative thing by society?

Should we take action to change the image or maintain it?

How do name brands effect how girls are viewed?

Who is going to look at them differently because of name brands?

What opportunities are given to those who are viewed as “better”?

Did we start wearing name brands more because we have more money?

Why is Starbucks better than McDonald’s coffee?

Is being viewed as a stereotypical white girl a bad thing?

Are name brands equally important to both genders?

Does it influence one gender’s image more than another?

Will this idea of a name-brand self image continue for a long time or fizzle out?

I went home this past weekend and of course I wanted to do the one thing that I haven’t been able to do since coming to college…shop. After going through every store in the mall, I decided that I should probably buy some things that I actually did need, like food. As I’m walking down the aisles of Walmart looking at Halloween candy, I looked over and was truly shocked by what I saw.

Christmas decorations! I am literally putting a peanut butter cup that is in the shape of a pumpkin in my shopping cart and there are mini Christmas tree with matching ornaments two aisles down! I was very curious whether or not other stores had actually started advertising for Christmas, so naturally I googled it.

I came across and advertisement from Kmart, that “wasn’t a Christmas ad” but actually was.

jThis commercial is hilarious because it is trying to come across as though they aren’t trying to pressure you, but yet they make it obvious that they are! They are really trying to play off of people’s emotions because they make it seem as though if they don’t start shopping for Christmas now, then they will have no time to get the gifts their family wants. This puts people into that panic sort of mindset, which is Kmart’s attempt to lure people in.

They are also trying to make it seem as though shopping for Christmas before Halloween is the logical thing to do because then they will have no worries in the world once they get it all done. This is actually a pretty effective advertisement, because as they create the scene of Christmas in their store, you realize just how close Christmas actually is, which may bring you back to last year’s crazy shopping! The fact that they also offer no money down doesn’t hurt their “logical” approach either.

While scrolling through my feed on Facebook, in between the new profile pictures and funny cat videos, I saw a campaign advertisement that one of my friends had shared. I honestly almost kept scrolling past it because it didn’t seem like anything out of the ordinary, but at second glance I realized just how wrong I was.

Yes, I thought that this was, yet another, model promoting, yet another, random handbag line. That is, until I realized the powerful message behind the image.

Cordaid is an international development organization based in the Netherlands that creates unique advertisements like the one above to bring awareness to poverty in struggling countries.

Their advertisements are successful because they make you aware of the problem by connecting you to the situation on an emotional level. I am guilty, as I’m sure many women are, of buying an overpriced handbag because it matched a pair of shoes perfectly. I never really stopped to think about everything that I take for granted, and this is exactly what this advertisement is making you do. The very skinny woman in the picture wearing old clothes with an undeveloped area in the background makes the purse seem so frivolously unnecessary. This woman is concerned about feeding her family and just wants to make it through another day, and here we are spending insane amounts of money for designer purses. Bringing out the feeling of guilt is definitely a strategy that Cordaid realizes is effective.

This provides a sense of civic duty, because if you are someone who can afford to buy a purse for hundreds of dollars, you can afford to spend your money to improve the lives of others who are less fortunate.

It really highlights the ideology that “Americans are materialistic” and makes you feel as though you can change this if you spend your money helping those in need, instead of the millionaires who own the successful line of handbags. This truly makes you stop and think, which is exactly why it is successful in its goal.

I have chosen Hilary Clinton’s Women’s Rights are Human Rights speech as my artifact to analyze. The first thing that drew me into the speech was the fact that I consider myself to be a feminist, so obviously I am going to have an interest in this and enjoy writing about it. I think it is very important for women to be on an equal playing field as men, and I believe that Hilary Clinton is a good representative to be able to bring us to that point. Then once I started looking into it more, she is addressing a very clear target audience. She does this by addressing women in general, but brings everyone together by saying that women are alike in more ways than not. A unique quality about this speech is that it was given in Beijing as part of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, so it doesn’t just limit her message to one place.Then once you begin to dive farther into it, there are numerous ideologies and commonplaces present throughout, even going as basic as “what it means to be viewed as a woman.” I think this speech is very complex and there is a lot that I can analyze and do with this essay.

I think it is very easy to critique yourself because people tend to focus of the things that they messed up on, instead of what they were actually really successful at. I think it was pretty obvious that my delivery wasn’t exactly on point, so I think that is the main problem that I had with my speech. I rehearsed and rehearsed, but obviously the evenness of my tone and the way that I presented my main points wasn’t exactly how I wanted it to be. It is definitely different once you get in front of an audience, so next time I will definitely practice in front of more people than just my roommate.

I actually really liked how straightforward and organized my speech was set up, even thought I may have had to stop a few times because I jumbled my words. I think it is easier for the audience to be able to retain what I have said if it is organized and also repetitive. A good example would be when I restated my main points in my conclusion, which really brought everything together.

One thing I’m kind of conflicted on is the use of a visual aid. While I think it would have been good to use one and it might have made my presentation a little more interesting, I am also glad that I didn’t use one because I felt as though many that were presented were very distracting, both to the audience and the presenter. So if I could use it in an effective way then I definitely would take advantage of that, but if I couldn’t then it would be something that I would try to avoid.

Overall, I am pretty satisfied with how it went. I managed to get all of my main points across in a decently effective manner.

As I was waiting for my Math Money class to start, I’m in the middle of a conversation with a guy sitting next to me. I could not remember his major and he could not remember mine, so we sat there guessing for a few minutes and finally I guessed his was international politics. I’m majoring in political science and international politics overlaps with it, so I asked if he intended on going to law school (because there aren’t tooooo many other things you can can with these degrees) and he said that he was thinking about it because he had a lawyer for his business that he just started and found the law very interesting.

He is a junior in college and already has his own business? What? I had to have him prove this, so he gave me his business card and I looked up his website.

To give a quick overview, it is a company that sells products like t-shirts and wristbands, and part of the profit goes to the “Restore the Shore” foundation, which aides in the restoration of the Jersey Shoreline and the victims of hurricanes and tropical storms there in.

This automatically draws you in to buy the products being sold because it creates a sense of civic duty because it is address a problem that needs to be fixed with an easy solution. It plays into the fact that many people were affected by the hurricane that hit the Jersey Shore, so many people can relate to the hard times that these people had to go through.

This ties in to logos because the solution to this problem is presented to seem very logical. It basically leads you to the conclusion that “by getting yourself something, you can give back at the same time.” All you have to do is hit “add item to cart” and you have instantly addressed the problem.