Visual Analysis Revised

This Coca-Cola advertisement was posted on Toxel.com, a blog that posts creative advertisements and other items to showcase design talent. The blog states that the ad is intended for a Russian audience, indicating Coca-Cola’s expansion into new international markets. Because of this new context, Coca-Cola has had to adapt its advertising appeal and angle. They must take into account the ways in which a Russian audience will respond to their product and the different symbols and emotional appeals that will inspire Russians to buy it. For example, Coca-Cola generally seeks to associate their beverages with refreshment. As this advertisement implies, refreshment takes a very different form in places like Russia and Coca-Cola is seeking to portray itself accordingly.

While the audience of this ad may be vastly different, the ad conveys similar emotions to other Coca-Cola ads. Its main emotions are those of satisfaction, refreshment, relief, and enjoyment. However, beneath these emotions, the ad also conveys certain negative feelings that form the presupposed basis for these positive emotions, giving the positive ones their impact. For example, by showing a man wearing gloves and a hat, standing in a frigid, snowy forest area, the viewer is led to feel cold and uncomfortable and thus angry, fearful, frustrated, or in pain or anguish. These emotions produce a need or longing in the viewer for other emotions to take their place.

The ad further presupposes the need of this man by his response to the bottle in the forefront. His eyes are shut, as though all the surrounding discomfort has disappeared or become irrelevant; he is gripping the bottle, indicating his intense desire for and enjoyment of its contents; the bottle is positioned above his head at a downward angle, with the arm holding it hidden, causing him to appear as a helpless baby, nursing at his mother’s breast or sucking on his beloved bottle for comfort and security. His clear satisfaction could only result from a striking need produced by discomfort.

This bottle is presented as clearly effective at alleviating the negative feelings this man must be experiencing, even more than all the warm clothing he is wearing. The viewer is thus led to pass through this process of feeling uncomfortable or dissatisfied and therefore angry, frustrated, or pained, to desiring relief from these emotions, to then experiencing an array of positive emotions because of the bottle in hand. Then, the item that is bringing fulfillment to the man’s need is identified to the viewer by the striking label in the center: Coca-Cola.

This emotional experience embodied in the ad inspires you to buy and drink Coca-Cola. This is based on the interpretation that, whenever the viewer finds himself in desperate need of relief, not only will this drink be enjoyable, but it will be able to quell all negative feelings caused by one’s environment. Another interpretation is that when all normal attempts may be powerless to bring relief from pain and agony, Coca-Cola is a reliable, powerful, compassionate, even empathetic force, willing to enter into the bitterly cold, painful experience to administer comfort and much needed satisfaction.

The emotional experience and appeal of the ad is built on certain stereotypes, such as the experience of desperation in uncomfortable situations. It uses this stereotype as representative of any unpleasant experience, identifying Coca-Cola as the ideal means of escape. The cold background is also iconic of an unpleasant situation, especially given the intended Russian audience. The Coca-Cola emblem and its being drunk by a happy customer is also a common symbol used to represent the Coca-Cola company and its products. Finally, the reminiscent positioning of the bottle is a symbol of dependence and innocence that most human beings, of any age, can relate to and might also reflect the nostalgic longing of most individuals for the security of their mother’s love and provision.

Visual Analysis

This coca-cola advertisement was posted on Toxel.com, a blog that posts creative advertisements and other items to showcase design talent. The blog states that the ad is intended for a Russian audience.

The main emotion that the ad conveys is one of satisfaction and enjoyment. The man is in a clearly cold climate and his facial expression shows that the coca-cola is alleviating any negative feelings he may be experiencing, bringing rest and fulfillment. The cold background produces a sense of need in the viewer, which is met by the drinking of the coca-cola drink, not even by all the warm clothing the drinker is wearing.

The ad inspires you to want to buy and drink coca-cola for the satisfaction and pleasure it can bring. Not only will the drink be enjoyable, but it will be able to quell all negative feelings caused by the environment.

The main interpretation in the ad is that coca-cola is the secret to dispelling all feelings of discomfort. After buying and drinking this drink, even the most frigid climates will not be able to maintain their grip of agony on the buyer of this drink.

The ad does build on certain stereotypes, such as the desperation one feels in uncomfortable situations. Also the cold background is somewhat stereotypical of an unpleasant situation as well.

Blog 2

Yet again, Aristotle exhibits his rather linear look at the world by his analysis of the distinctions that come with age. He identifies the stages of life—youth, prime of life, and old age—and generalizes that there are common virtues and vices held at each of these stages. Several questions arise with this over-simplified categorization of humanity.

First, how do we apply these three stages to the human race? They might make sense conceptually, but in practice, who is truly young—a person who has been alive for less than 2/3 of life expectancy?

Along these same lines, what brings a person from one stage of life to the next? Is it simply the passage of time? Or do life experience, personality, and upbringing also contribute to these advances? And, are these truly set stages of life in which, once people advance to one stage, they fully and absolutely leave the previous stage behind? Or could people, perhaps, begin to enter “old age” and either relapse into the prime of life (e.g. a mid-life crisis) or decide after a time that this is not an enjoyable way to live and return to youth? And this begs the question, does human agency have any impact on the transitions between these stages or is a progression (or regression) through these stages simply inevitable?

In additon, could these “stages” in fact be mindsets that may tend to occur at certain stages of life but actually could occur at any age? If so, could it be that these mindsets are actually not so absolutely defined but vary based on societal, economic, cultural, racial, physiological and familial factors? Or are they really based purely on age?

And if this is the case, isn’t Aristotle’s explication rather incomplete? Can human life, like human emotion, really be placed neatly into boxes for observation? And in so doing, don’t we over-simplify realities about humanity that are far more complex and involved and thereby ignore vast amounts of information that are necessary in truly understanding, and persuading, human beings?

I think so.

Blog 1

Aristotle attempts to divide and categorize human emotions in Book II of his Rhetoric. He presents several binary pairs in an attempt to explain the breadth of human emotion. He also seeks to break down emotional experience into each emotion’s respective frame of mind, person toward whom it is directed, and on what ground it occurs. While this is certainly a noble attempt on his part, this is ultimately a futile effort. Human emotion simply cannot be divided neatly into simple pairs of opposite emotions or neat causal distinctions. Elements of both sides of his pairs and of different emotions can be present simultaneously and, consequently, emotions are rarely so clearly defined.

Aristotle’s distinctions divide emotions in a way that does not reflect human experience. For example, he identifies calmness and anger as opposites. While this may be true externally, this is not necessarily the case when considering both internal emotions and their external expressions. One might very well be outwardly calm while inwardly furious, working diligently to manage their anger. Also, frequently, when anger is externally expressed, it may be the expression of another emotion entirely. In other words, the person, frame of mind, and grounds for anger may have nothing to do with anger itself as Aristotle defines it; rather, a person may be filled with pity or depression or sorrow or irritation and the external expression may be what we call anger: the root emotion may not be what Aristotle considers anger but another emotion. Aristotle’s distinctions fail to take into account the vast interrelatedness and complexity of human emotion.

The same is true for calmness, friendship, fear, kindness, etc. Emotions rarely, if ever, occur in isolation; they build off of each other based on the individual emotional framework of each person. As a result, emotions cannot be defined rationally in an objective way. It is true that each individual’s emotional experience can be understood, to some extent, rationally. However, one must consider each individual’s breadth of emotions subjectively—the emotions he or she is capable of experiencing, to what degree and in what manner he or she experiences those emotions, and how his or her own experiences and physiology cause his or her emotions to work with and in response to each other. Objective and sweeping generalizations about emotions, such as those found in Rhetoric, are helpful only in explaining possible factors related to emotions, but there are infinitesimal factors that cause emotions of various kinds, and they simply do not occur in the neat little boxes Aristotle identifies.