 | These two ads I have chosen to analyze are very similar in that they use the female body to advertise their particular beers, and don't picture any males with them. The first is an ad for Coors Light, which it states is the official sponsor of the National Football League, so their ad is geared toward the fans. This advertisement's audience is male because it was found in a men's magazine and many of the fans for the NFL are men. The most obvious reason that this is geared toward heterosexual men is the fact that there are two twin-looking cheerleaders with large breasts, blonde hair, and shirts pulled up so their entire midriffs are showing. The twin fantasy is a stereotypical turn-on for all heterosexual men, and so having two girls instead of one plays on that. The girls take up three fourths of the top of the ad, therefore the ideal in this ad is very large, whereas the real is quite small. Right away the viewer is pulled into the ad by the way that both of the girls are looking directly at the viewer. Jewitt and Oyama claim that this is to establish some sort of an imaginary relationship with the viewer. (Jewitt and Oyama; 145) They make direct contact while smiling very big as to bring the viewer in and keep their attention. It looks as though they are in motion and are moving because one of their arms is up in the air and their hair is being blown by the wind. I feel like this makes the viewer feel as though he is there or he wants to be there with them. In return they also offer themselves to the male gaze. They are putting themselves in a place where males may fantasize about them because they are showing skin, and nothing about them is stereotypically ugly or wrong. |
The bottom of the page, or the real, has the Coors Light logo, as well as the logo for the NFL. The text that is meant to be read first because it is it all capital letters and bright red is, "HERE'S TO FOOTBALL." I think it is quite a contradiction because there is nothing at all about football on the ad. In place of the word "football" it might as well have been "cheerleaders." I believe that in this case the producers mean that they are excited about football because you can drink Coors Light at the game, while also having cheerleaders there to entertain you. If they would have had two football players in the same position as the cheerleaders many men may have been turned off because that would have been considered homosexual. Therefore, I believe this ad targets men to drink Coors Light because it brings them to the game and allows them to be in the presence of women like the ones staring back at them.
| The St. Pauli Girl advertisement has similar features in that the female body is looked at as something to fantasize about, yet it is not an actual live woman on the ad. This ad I believe is a play on words, but instead of being all about the beer that they the producers of the ad are trying to sell, they are in fact sexualizing the female body, even though it's not a real one. The entire layout of the ad is taken up by a silhouette of a female, but instead of having natural body parts, she is completely made out of beer. This may be difficult to realize at first since it is just a yellow color, but the hair makes it easier to understand because you can tell that it is foam. The female body is ideologically perfect because she is slim with perky breasts and long flowing hair. The text at the bottom of the ad reads "Drop Dead Refreshing." Everybody knows that a common phrase to describe a woman is "drop dead gorgeous" and this is where the play on words occurs. The beer is so refreshing that it gives you the same satisfaction of a gorgeous woman. |  |
There is no mortise of the actual bottle of St. Pauli Girl, but there is a logo at the bottom, which happens to have a blonde girl on it serving beer. If you look closely you can also see that there is an imprint of the logo located behind the woman taking up a lot of the area but it is barely noticeable. Since it is so hard to see it makes the woman the front and center attraction of the ad and nothing else.
Both of these ads sexualize the female body in order to advertise their beers, yet they do it in very different ways. One plays on the fantasy of cheerleader twins while another does not even include a real woman body, but an outline of a perfect body filled in with beer. They are both found in men's magazines and this is why they target a male audience by using the female figure to capture their attention and make them desire the beer because it might possibly have an effect on if they get women like this.