Monday, April 30, 2012

Hannah Schober - Final Critique Spoof Ads







My Spoof Ads are making fun of the brand Abercrombie and Fitch.  In my ads, the name has been changed to Fashionzombie and Bitch. I chose to make a 3 part series for my magazine ads.  They are entitled, Young and Naked, Unoriginal and Snobby, and Nonexistent Wannabe. I took the images of my friend Jefferson Covey with a Lumix 12 megapixel camera, and used Photoshop to edit the images and add text. I finished my ads on May 1, 2012.

The type of medium these ads are meant to be in is print, in a magazine like Teen Vogue. The subject is a young, thin, African American male, wearing either stylish clothes or no clothes at all. In Abercrombie and Fitch’s ads, they are recognizable through their grayscale images featuring a young man or woman, with barely any clothes on, looking down with attitude at the camera. Therefore, in order to keep with their defining compositional elements and principle, I shot my subject outside, and in post production I zoomed in, cropped closely, and blurred the backgrounds to bring focus to the subject. I do not specify a particular article of clothing but simply refer to the brand in general, as the originals do. I also used the same font types as Abercrombie, Franklin Gothic Book and Bebas, to identify the brand and give strength to its advertisement theme and style. For my copy, I found descriptions of particular clothes lines on their website, and adapted them to fit my needs, thus conveying my message ironically in the communication style of the company. 

As the creator, I bring a certain bias to my works. I perceive Abercrombie and Fitch as an expensive brand that does not practice tolerance or respect toward others, and has distasteful advertising by not actually featuring a product or anything to do with clothes. I believe my approach is in line with many others I have seen by both my fellow students and other works online. Spoof ads leave much to the interpretation of the viewer, but are clearly steered by the perspective of the creator. If the viewer agrees with you, you are successful.  I must admit, I admire some of my fellow students’ creativity and find their work to be cleverer than my own. Perhaps my vision was too broad.

According to Abercrombie and Fitch’s CEO, "You buy into the emotional experience of a movie," Jeffries explains, "And that's what we're creating.” If he is right, they are creating a sex film.  Abercrombie and Fitch’s current ad campaign is based off the racy marketing photography by Bruce Weber.  His photography is rendered to grayscale and features outdoor settings, usually with semi-nude males and females. I used this technique for my own photographs, following Bruce Weber’s design, however I did not aim for very racy or lustful, as I did not have a wide variety of models at my disposal who were willing to pose provocatively for me and my little point-and-shoot.  Abercrombie and Fitch also casts only store employees for marketing campaigns, while I used a normal college student. 

My intent for this spoof ad was to convey that the consumers who purchase Abercrombie and Fitch clothes do so simply because they are told the clothes are fashionable, without stopping to analyze whether they like the styles available, and they tend to believe, or at least act as if, the clothes they are now wearing make them better than others who buy more affordable apparel. This rationale explains my adapted brand name of Fashionzombie and Bitch. 

For my unconventional ad, I created a T-shirt, screened with the “Young and Sexy” ad. This T-shirt can be worn by anyone who agrees with my intent that Abercrombie and Fitch’s brand is stuck-up and unoriginal. To wear the T-shirt, I used a Google picture of Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, who was recently paid by Abercrombie and Fitch not to wear their clothes in public anymore. The irony of this is that Abercrombie and Fitch attracted the type of person he is through their brand identity and marketing strategies, but do not like the image he is creating for their brand. Therefore I have put him in one of my Spoof T-shirts to mock the image they are sending and apparently don’t condone when confronted with it.

I believe my final project is successful. I believe my copying of photographic and typographic style makes my ads instantly brand-recognizable as Abercrombie and Fitch. However, I do believe I might have gotten a bit ambitious with what I wanted to convey. One must have had my same experiences with Abercrombie and Fitch wearers to understand my meaning.

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