Two recent cartoons, a One Big Happy in which the grandmother copes with black street speech with an app for her audience; and a Doonesbury in which marijuana companies tailor their products and their advertising for gay and black audiences.
Archive for the ‘Language in advertising’ Category
Audiences
May 21, 2017Regional potato chips
May 10, 2017Today’s bon appétit top story, “Regional Potato Chips You’ve Never Heard Of”:
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Frito-Lay may rule most supermarket snack aisles, but once upon a time, regional potato chips dominated the American snacking scene. A visit to West Virginia wasn’t complete without a crunchy bag of Mister Bee. Headed to Ohio? Pick up a greasy handful of rippled Ballreich’s “Marcelled” chips. Many local titans aren’t the powerhouses they once were and countless others less fortunate have gone the way of the Marathon Bar, but their deep-fried legacy continues to bubble away on a smaller scale, thanks to online stores. Here are nine you should try, because there’s nothing more patriotic than supporting small businesses while stuffing your face with potato chips.
blue jack
May 5, 2017It started with my observing to a friend that a container in which a blue cheese had been stored can be used to start “blu(e)ing” any cheese, citing the blue cheddar I had recently created in my refrigerator. And then this friend went off to buy some cheese for me, and came across some blue jack, a blue version of Monterey Jack. Jack is a mild cheese that has the virtue of being sliceable, and sliceable blue cheeses aren’t easy to come by (most blue cheeses crumble or shatter), so blue jack could be a good find. And so it was:
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Like a mayfly
May 1, 2017Today’s Bizarro:
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(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Appropriately for May Day, this strip is ephemeral: this month, if you keep up with popular culture, it’s wryly funny, but a year from now, almost no one will understand it. (Yes, I’m going to explain it.)
Appeal to base instinct
April 29, 2017The Daily Jocks ad from the 25th, with an appeal to base, or low, instincts (of taking pleasure in viewing the male body); to the basic, or fundamental, instinct of sexual appetite; and ultimately to an appreciation of the fundamental, or basilar, that is, gluteal:
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On the lexical items involved — among them, the moral adjective base, the adjective basic, the noun fundament, and the adjective basilar — see my discussion in the earlier posting today “base(ly)”. Here, I’m slipping back and forth between locational understandings of these expressions, moral understandings, and anatomical understandings.
Demented p.r. pitches, absurd ad copy
February 24, 2017Recently the admirable Margalit Fox has been posting on Facebook a series “Demented P.R. Pitch of the Day” (Margalit seems to read more of her nonsense mail than I do). I’ll give the two most recent examples and then turn to some long-standing advertising themes in my own postings: absurd ad copy for premium men’s underwear and for gay porn. (So, yes, in the second case there will be some incidental sex talk.)
Stud Finder
February 18, 2017(Discussion of men’s bodies and male-on-male sex in mostly very plain language, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Today’s playtime viewing began with a compilation video of scenes from porn flicks featuring Trenton Ducati, beginning with an especially nicely crafted scene from the 2012 TitanMen Stud Finder, involving Jed Athens, Ford Andrews, and Ducati. Well, yes, a bit of titular word play, combining carpentry / construction work and hot men.
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The DVD cover, with Ducati in the middle
Poppin’ Fresh in a pink dress
January 22, 2017(It starts with dough and cross-dressing and eventually touches on several sexy topics. So: definitely racy, but probably not enough to frighten the horses in the street.)
Today’s Rhymes With Orange portrays the kinky side of the Pillsbury Doughboy, Poppin’ Fresh (the advertising icon and mascot of the Pillsbury Company):
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The Doughboy cross-dressing in an adorable pink skirt — a fluted cupcake liner, from the set on the kitchen counter.
Now: some remarks on cupcakes; a note on sexual undercurrents in the Poppin’ Fresh ads; and extensive discussion of sentient, speaking figures (often anthropomorphic, as here) in advertising, cartoons, or fictions of other kinds, figures that are in fact foodstuffs.
Annals of double entendre
January 21, 2017Comment by Robert Coren on my “Meaty matters” posting:
“It Ain’t the Meat, It’s the Motion” inescapably reminds me of a cigarette ad from my youth, whose slogan I chose to interpret in a way probably not intended by its creators: “It’s not how long you make it, it’s how you make it long”.
The 1951 song title was intended to convey (in the Wiktionary gloss)
When it comes to sexual satisfaction, penis size doesn’t matter, but technique does.
The cigarette ad from the 60s (which came in many variants, for television and for print media) was for Winston Super Kings, and the sexual innuendo was surely not inadvertent.