Why use advertising images?

Using adverts in class is an invaluable and entertaining way to develop intercultural awareness as advertising is a dynamic phenomenon that can help raise awareness about a multitude of different topics and attitudes in our rapidly changing society. It is the precisely that dynamism that makes them work so well in the language classroom. Their attention-seeking devices are recognised and appreciated by learners who have been exposed to so many of them on a daily basis. In addition, their strategies and techniques can be easily analysed and learners generally respond well to such a procedure.

John Berger, in his seminal 1972 book Ways of Seeing, described the advertising images the we see every day as the most frequent and concentrated collection of visual messages in history1; how much truer are those words today? Advertising is now directed at us from almost every angle imaginable and at any hour: as banners on websites, as messages on your mobile, as spam or as cold calls in the middle of the night. The Internet has also led to an extraordinary increase in the types of advertising that have emerged and who produces it. Viral ads are seen by enormous audiences on You Tube and other sites, digital technology has meant that anyone can produce their own ad and upload it for millions to see and comment on; type in McDonald’s ad on You Tube and see what happens. It is hard to know which ads are official and which homemade. A good example is this viral ad that the fast food giants spotted online and transformed into an official advert for the company- a gesture that says it all. Controversial advertising campaigns, such as Benetton’s series some years ago have transformed adverts into art forms in which the product is no longer visible but merely suggested. Nowadays, such campaigns make newspaper headlines as advertisers try any new technique or strategy to capture the general public’s attention and create hype. So why do some adverts go entirely unnoticed and while others are endlessly talked about? Certain companies such as Calvin Klein, Diesel or Absolut have done this by making their adverts iconic and instantly recognizable, fixing the gaze of viewers with their subversion of publicity conventions.  Although ephemeral, their messages - like so much advertising - are able to reflect and construct cultural identities.

Some ideas for using advertising images in class

One effective way to use publicity images is to try and work out the strategies and techniques that the advertising experts use. To do this we need a set of questions which can be applied to any advert in the print media to enable learners to interact with advertising on an engaging and critical level; to get to grips with this wallpaper of consumer culture. These questions could include*:

• What techniques have the advertisers adopted to attract our attention?
• What associations does the image have for you?
• What values does this (person) represent?
• Why was this person chosen to advertise this product?
• Who do you think the advert is aimed at (the target market)?
• What do you think is the advert’s message?
• What angle have the advertisers taken?

A key aspect of successful advertising is, as we mentioned earlier, brand identity. The link between image and brand is central to how advertising works and is a stimulating topic the classroom. If you’d like to try an activity centred around brand identity, a task from Working with Images can be downloaded here.

Finding advertising images to use

So, where to go for a rich source of interesting advertising to use in class? One excellent source for contemporary ads is www.adsoftheworld.com. Here you can search for ads by product type, media and country. For other links, see the Working with Images site. One of these is an advertising archive

which allows us to see how the role of print media adverts has changed from one generation to the next. An interesting task is to analyse a product such as Coca Cola and witness how its adverts represent different images/messages over a period of a century or more. Such an analysis shows how society’s values and associations have changed. See Working with Images task 6.4; The old and the new.  Another interesting website is adbusters where you can find spoof adverts including parodies of well-known brands that make a political point. This brings us to subvertising. As we saw above with Benetton and other campaigns, adverts are not just innocent images with the sole aim of selling a product, but rather powerful tools in their own right capable of subverting our ideas and changing our mentality in a very short space of time. Let learners create their own adverts and they well be able to discover that for themselves. Expand the idea by using tasks 6.8 and 6.10 in Working with Images.

*Tasks 6.2 and 6.3 of Working with Images go into more depth and offer some activities to focus on these ideas in class.

Ben Goldstein is a teacher, teacher trainer and materials writer. He teaches online at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Barcelona and on the MA Tesol Program for the New School, New York. He is the main author of the New Framework adult coursebook series (Richmond Publishing) and author ofWorking with Images (Cambridge University Press). His main interests in ELT are the use of images, World Englishes and intercultural issues.