For my final project I am going to focus on the infamous Calvin Klein advertisements that have gotten nothing less than controversial reviews over the years.
I intend to analyze both commercial advertisements and print advertisements from various campaigns and will be discussing just how the brand uses sex to sell their product. In addition to this, I hope to focus on how the brand uses inappropriate themes within their campaigns such as child pornography and the sexualization of children themselves in reference to their toddler underwear campaign.
As a major topic within the media and within the field of advertising studies I am able to use both news reports and academic papers in regards to these campaigns specifically.
By analyzing these ads I will be able to put together a multimedia presentation as I will need to show both print and commercial ads to further prove my point.
If any of you have suggestions on any other perspectives I could analyze I would love to hear them!
This has the potential to get a bit sticky, I think. You will want to be careful with the word inappropriate, I think. What specifically do you mean by inappropriate? You may even want to choose a different word altogether as it is a word that is very subjective. You might do best to simply focus on how the ads oversexualize children. That said, you will need to offer a clear analysis of the first ad to prove it does oversexualize children. It seems that you are, in part, arguing that the oversexualization is present because of the viewers prior knowledge of the adult ads. I'm not 100% sure you can prove that.
ReplyDeleteI know I said I think you should just focus on the child pornography-esque photos to narrow the content you are looking at, but on second thought, there seems to be a lot of work done on the topic. Maybe you could look at some arguments from essays online, even from library journal articles, and try and take the argument in a new place. I know it's not exactly a clear recommendation, but I always find this helps me establish an argument after I've compared other findings.
ReplyDeleteOne idea could be to compare the above ads, and that could lead you to some concrete examples as to how the children are being sexualized. You may want to also take a look at how the company handled the situation (this may be straying a bit from your original idea). I don't know if its the same designer that oversaw that ads as who is designing for CK runway shows (Francisco Costa), but the NY fashion week was incredibly conservative. Again this may be branching out quite a bit, but just an idea.
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