For my print adverts I plan to advertise a can of deodorant. I will create two adverts, with one version being much more modernised and reactionary, and another being one which you would encounter a fairly long time ago, being more traditional and radical. Taken together, these adverts will show the contrasting features of traditional adverts compared to contemporary, more modern ones.

For the contemporary (new) advert, the dominant signifier will exhibit a more confident and dominant pose and wearing more realistic, modern clothes, relating to the idea of the “cool man” and appearing in a conventional way to show the product off. I will also include a sleek, non-obtrusive background, adding to the more modern approach to the product and to promote values of modest beauty. The symbolic sign of the text will be more polished, adding to the cool and trendy connotations that the product gives off. The planned audience positioning here is that younger, more impressionable young men will show a positive reaction to the product, and want to buy it after seeing how calm and collected the dominant signifier is, and thus they would be provided with a role model to aspire to. This would lead to a constructed identity as described by David Gauntlett of self-esteem upon buying and using the product, which I believe is a rather positive idea. A potential downside to this however is the chance that this could be relating to voyeurism and patriarchy, particularly if the theory of errors in encoding/decoding messages as described by Shannon and Weaver comes into effect. I think that this type of advert would be produced by a company selling beauty products at a professional standard, trying to coerce impressionable young people into buying their products.

For my traditional (older) style of advert, the dominant signifier will be wearing more traditional clothing and be wearing a wig, which gives connotations of wildness. In addition, the iconic signs, being the images of the product itself, will use more clashing colours. I will also include an indexical signifier which is random and arbitrary, similar to that which you would find in a comic, labelling the product as new and adding to the theme of wild ambition. This will represent the deodorant in a more radical way, suggesting that the model doesn’t care as much about how he looks or what he smells like, while still encouraging the consumer to purchase the product because of the idea that they will want to obtain the self-confidence, which the advert gives off, for themselves. I think that the target audience who would consume this is an older demographic than the modern advert, because the style is obviously from some time ago. This means that a wider age bracket would be interested in buying the product, although that audience is likely to be less impressionable. I think that the institution likely to be creating an advert like this is one which was formed a fair amount of time ago, selling products that could perhaps be considered a tad outdated nowadays, however they would clearly still know how to find their target audience effectively and consequently sell a fair amount of products.