Pet care ads

According to Representation Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, these days have a lot of ideas more than “stereotyping”. In my opinion, “otherness” concept is similar with “thinking out of the box” and the “stereotyping” is the box. As the technology development, it provides many ways (such as Photoshop) to design or create what we couldn’t made from our imagination before.

(Published: April 2013 . Advertising Agency: Leg, Paris, France)

Pictures above are the French pet supplies advertisements call Biocanina with the slogan that “Love Him Like You Love Yourself”. It cleverly combines animals with human forms. I like this because it kind of unnormal. Their ads both can catch viewer’s attention by these cute animals and use the slogan to put the owners in the human-situation. By adding the human gesture, they looks like a real human in different appearance. As Stuart Hall says, “Representation is a complex business and, especially when dealing with ‘difference’, it engages feelings, attitudes and emotions…(226)”. I agree with that because other than the creativity ideas, I can see what the concept is trying to relate everything human beings apply on animals. For example, the very first one gave us the emotion of looks bored by the eye content and the position the hand under the pet's chin. That is funny sometimes animals do have human emotion but people don’t usually take a picture and make them like a real model. As a dog owner, these pictures do make me think of “what if my dog being on the picture like this?” It will just be super meaningful for me to decorate my dog as pretty as I want. If I want to be clean and pretty, why not do so on my pet? In this case, I think the ads got the goal of making people think deeper without harmful to the animals. Moreover, we can see the business power behind the ads that their goal is to earn money from the animal supplies and probably focus on dogs and cats these common pets.

(Agency Network: Tuppi, Published/Aired: April 2013, Posted: June 30, 2013)

Here is another ad examples from Brazilian pet salon Pet Beauty that connect to the human been- selfie. Same as many picture examples in the reading, these two company’s ads works by the marketing of “difference”. Our stereotyping for animal picture suppose to be on the ground, unconsciously look at the camera. But these ads fully let animals act autonomy like humans. Unlike the racial difference in the reading, these ads are the personification difference.

There is an interesting power found behind the ads about marketing and business though pets. Compare to the reading talks about the racial difference, majority people who owns money and the power during that time were white people. How about the cases above? Even though the target audience are the pets owner, there is a similar point that people who owns the money and power are more afford to decorate their pets.

In brief, both of these ads are focusing on pet care and pet beauty. The ads targets to the customers both love their pets and affordable for extra expenses by creating the creativity cute ads with well-knowing consumer mind to attract them.

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Citation:

Hall, Stuart. Representation - Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. SAGE Publ., 1997.