The Odor That Will Last Forever

Laura Chapa
ENGL 1302.36
Professor Heather Brown
04/04/12
The Odor That Will Last Forever
There are so many commercials around the world that advertise every single product that exist and had existed. When I was a child, I remember I used to change over channels to watch the commercials that advertise products from all every country. A couple of years ago, I saw a very interesting commercialthat made me think about the different aspects that the commercial portraits. It is a commercial by Axe, and it is advertising a new formula of their fragrance that according to them will last forever. I saw it once while I was surfing the web looking for good advertisements. I found it in YouTube approximately two years ago. When I saw it I knew that the commercial was not targeted to a personlike me. Its target market is that one that includes men that want to be a gigolo and conquest every single woman in a club or in a bar and that want to smell good at any moment for them. I believe this commercial contains various stereotypes, and I am going to address these in the following essay.
The commercial begins showing a guy that is not attractive at all using Axe. After this scene heappears in a night club totally transformed into a player and women were seeking after him. Then a mosquito bites him and a frog eats the mosquito. The frog right away starts reproducing with another frog. Then the frog is caught and cooked and an older man eats the frog in a restaurant. The older man is transformed into the target of a younger and sexy woman. They had sex and the old men died. Whenhe is buried the worms in the cemetery they get together and create a heart with their bodies while they are kissing each other. In my opinion the idea of the commercial is well developed because it shows that the fragrance of the deodorant last even after the older man died. Every aspect of the commercial plays an important role. The music transfers the audience to a place where love and pleasurehave the control of them. According to Philip Graves, “When a well-known song is used (in a commercial) it will have an existing set of powerful associations: once these are activated people listening are more likely to access related thoughts and connect them with the product being featured in the ad” (1). The colors seduce the audience to the point that they can be part of the commercial andidentified themselves with one of the characters that are presented in the plot. The language that the commercial presents is not verbal but dynamic. It transfers the audience to those moments when they play the role of seductive people or the seduced piece of the game of flirting. The colors that are presented during almost the whole video are brilliant. Color red also appears during the wholecommercial. According to the web page Color Wheel Pro, “Red is the color of fire and blood, so it is associated with energy, war, danger, strength, power, determination as well as passion, desire and love”(1). In my opinion, all these elements are like characters in the video because they make you feel the atmosphere that the commercial is playing with.
I believe that the message that thiscommercial is trying to give to the audience is that everyone can be so seductive with the proper help, in this case Axe, and that if they use this deodorant they will have any woman they want. If I were a men and I saw this commercial I would be really tempted to buy the product because I would like to be like the young boy that was not very attractive but had every women in the night club at his feet orlike the older men that a sexy and young women to satisfy his sexual needs even if that cost him his life. I really feel really attracted by the commercial with this message of totally sexiness and power to seduce women.
I believe that the hidden message under all the different perspectives of the commercial is that this is a very strong product that no matter who get in contact with the...