Blogging Fun

So this past week I began project four. After going over my options, I decided to go with a blog as my form of multimedia. Having worked with wordpress this semester through class, I figured this would be the blog machine that I would use. I created a domain name and began setting up my blog and realized that it was a lot of fun to set up. I had a limited number of backgrounds to choose from but it was plenty for me and I found one relatively quickly that I liked. Moving from there on, I next decided the pages to add to my blog, the links to add, and also the extras or widgets to add. I ended up choosing widgets for links, calendar, authors, my blog stats and recent posts. I was most excited to add blog stats to see how many people visited my site. I didn’t think that making the blog would be that much fun at all, and I thought too that it would be harder than what it is. I’m glad Ms. Ludeker has made us expand our horizons from the normal straightforward paper.

Benetton Ads

After our discussion in class today on Benetton, I wanted to look a little bit more into the company. While perusing around on their website I decided to look into what their clothes looked like. The clothing line is modern and colorful and the company also sells perfumes, shoes, glasses and luggage bags. Under store locations, I found that the closest Benetton store is in Chicago, while other large cities here in the U.S. also have the clothing store. In doing a little research on Wikipedia and looking into some sites that popped up from the Google search I found that the ads we discussed in class were meant to be controversial and shocking. It was intended that 50% possibly like them and 50% possibly hated them. There were other ads mentioned in the Wikipedia article that were not shown on the site we looked at, that are even more outrageous then the few that we briefly went over. Other sites talked about boycotting the company, as it wanted to plant tracking devices on all of its clothes, while other sites mentioned the company’s affiliation with sports teams.
From the ads that we looked at in class, it seemed that the older ads from the late 80’s and early 90’s were much more controversial then the newer ads, visually. The older ads were definitely bold and unique but I’m not sure the message of the ad was conveyed totally. In some instances it could be assumed what the message was, while in other instances the message was unclear. The newer ads, which still showed problems of the world, were not as daring and blunt as the older ads. However, the images were no doubt still unique and the advertising style could still be questioned. Overall the ad campaign devised by Benetton of trying to sell clothes by using images not related to clothing at all is shall we say, a bit odd.

Food For Life

In this week’s reading of chapter 6 there was one picture which I found disturbing, the spoon hand. I think what startled me most was how around the end of the prosthetic his skin is being pulled and twisted as if it almost hurts. This visual definitely makes an impact on your thoughts when you look at it and then when you see what it is advertising you get a better understanding of why the picture was used. Although I don’t believe that this is the best aid to be using for the Food for Life campaign. I think a better advertisement may be someone donating food to a pantry or a volunteer serving food at a soup kitchen or handing out food to the needy. I have to agree with the book when they say that the advertising does stand out though.