Original ad (the first one)
This is a vintage piece of advertisement about cigarettes, which delivers two messages. First, cigarettes makes man more attractive to woman. This is shown by the image of the man holding his cigarettes on the right half of the poster. He is presented to be attractive to the woman on the left half of the poster because the latter gazing at him with affection. Two figures do not have physical touches on each other, in other words, the man does not touch the woman’s body; but the man is blowing the smoke of his cigarettes in the woman’s face, and this smoke creates a delicate and ambiguous bond between them. This can be understood as a hint to sexuality behaviours. In specific, the man is suggesting on sex to the woman by blowing his smoke in her face, while the woman is attracted by him and also agrees on sex because of his smoking behaviour. Along with the slogan presented in the ad, “Blow in her face and she’ll follow you anywhere”, the poster conveys the message that cigarettes makes the man more attractive to woman. This message is problematic because smoking cigarettes is an unhealthy behaviour which will result in higher risk on lung cancer. However, this ad is inciting people to smoke because it would make man more attractive, without showing any harmful results which could be brought by smoking cigarettes.
Second message that delivered by this poster is the inequality between males and females. Above I discussed about the hint on sexuality in this poster. This hint tacitly acknowledges the submission position of woman. In particular, the woman is the one who passively accepts the hint of sexuality in her romance relationship. The stink smoke was blowed in her face, which is never considered as a good experience. This behaviour also suggests a humiliation because she was taking the wasted air, used by the man. The woman figure in this poster is a belittled and submissive.
Lastly, I want to state the reasons why I choose this vintage ad instead of current ones. This vintage ad is problematic for its historic nature, in other words, this ad is accepted by the public in the past and never will be accepted by the audience today for its problematic information hidden within the ad. However, I chose this ad because the problems, although they are aware by public in today’s society, but still not be solved fully. Instead, the trends in today’s society is to neglect the problem. Not mentioning problems and not facing problems are not equal to solve problems. Thus, this ad, which exaggerated the problems discussed above, became the perfect sample for me to bring up the problems and call for solutions once again.
Jammed version of the ad (the second one)
I used photoshop to capture the woman figure as well as the smoke air and inverted the pigments. By doing this, I tried to changed the image of the woman from the submissive female to the image of horror. The inverted colours are uncomfortable to view. It turns the woman figure into an image of the demon.
I tried to alter the ads to convey two messages. First, in terms of the problematic propaganda on smoking making a man attractive to a woman, this altered piece delivered the message that smoking makes a man attractive to a demon. The demon can be understood as the pain of lung cancer, which would raise people’s awareness on diseases brought by smoking. Along with the slogan, now the posters hints that smoking the cigarettes will make the demon of diseases follow you anywhere.
Second, the image of demon still preserved her woman features, which makes the audience feel horror to her. This horror also combines with respect to the powerful spiritual image of woman. This alteration is delivering the powerful message to the audience that if females are not treated equally and still be considered as submission by males, females are powerful enough to fight back.
I also want to add lines and colours inspired by La Calavera Catrina, the icon of Mexican Day of the Dead, in order to make the figure closer to the image of demon or ghost. But this creation is limited by my technology knowledge. But I still want to present my idea here in this explanation paper, and I am looking forward to finish my design when I learn more about using Adobe Creative suites.