The author of My Flamboyant Grandson uses hyperbole to exaggerate modern advertising and juxtaposes the modern and futuristic advertising strategies with the Grandfather’s understanding of America to show the absurdity of the extremely personalized advertising world and its effects on personal freedom and self-expression. The Grandfather in the story understands that his grandson, Teddy, is different, that his actions aren’t conducive to the societal norm and throughout the story he analyzes Teddy’s struggle with self-expression in an abrasive society. “The boys in his school are hard on him, as are the girls, as are the teachers, and recently we found his book bag in the Susquehanna…”(Saunders 463) Teddy deals with a society that wants him to think, act, and look a certain way and he find himself unable to express his thoughts, actions, and look because of a crude and concrete social norm. These social norms and criticism …show more content…
Teddy receives for not following them are a huge detriment to his confidence and renders him unable to feel comfortable in his own skin. When his Grandfather decides to take him to a Broadway show they run into their own barriers when their ticket isn’t enough to get into the show and the must travel through the busy streets of New York to get into the show. As they travel to get the requirements necessary for admission to the show they experience the very personalized, visually attractive advertisements that litter the buildings, windows, and even sidewalks they walk on. “All around and all above us were those towering walls of light, curving across building fronts, embedded in the sidewalks, custom-fitted to light poles: a cartoon lion eating a man in a suit; a rain of gold coins falling into the canoe of a naked rain-forest family…”(Saunders 464). The streets are literally covered with massive displays of seemingly unnecessary advertisements that are personalized to each person. However, when the Grandfather takes his shoes off due to his bleeding and swollen feet, a Citizen Helper comes and demands that he put them back on or he’ll be written up. “I told all this to the Citizen Helper, who asked if I was aware that, by rendering my Strips Inoperative, I was sacrificing a terrific opportunity to Celebrate My Preferences?” (Saunders 465) With his feet bleeding and the Citizen Helper writing him up, the Grandfather rips the Citizen Helper’s ticket pad and him and Teddy run off to catch the show. The Grandfather eventually had to either pay $1,000 or return to New York City and work with the Citizen Helper to review every advertisement he missed.
He travels and meets with the Citizen Helper only to have a revelation about what America used to be and analyze the trouble with the understanding of the personal freedom the country promised it’s citizens. “This, to me, is not America. What America is, to me, is a guy who doesn’t want to buy, you let him not buy, you respect his not buying” (Saunders 465). Grandfather’s understanding of America challenges the situation he’s currently in, being forced to pay a fine or observe advertisements as though he broke a law. The absurdity of a Citizen Helper, comparable to a police officer, issuing a massive ticket or what some could see as community service for missing a few advertisements is something that limits the Grandfathers ability to be free. His ability to live freely and have his decisions respected by authority and others alike is something he sees with advertising and in Teddy’s
situation. The advertising world uses “innovative” methods that affect the personal freedoms of Americans and cause Grandfather to juxtapose his past understanding of America with the current America whose exclusive society leaves Teddy as an outcast through the author’s use of hyperbole. Teddy’s personal freedoms are limited because he thinks, acts, and looks different while Grandfather can’t have his decisions respectfully considered in the America he lives in today. The author uses hyperbole to show how personal freedoms are limited by not only advertising but, through connecting Teddy’s person struggle to fit in to such a harsh and critical society, how a lot of elements in American society can limit a person’s freedoms that many, like Grandfather, understand America to have.
- The best example is to keep the logo as clean and clean as possible, Google company logo
Many television commercials choose to feature a contrast between youth and maturity as their subject. An “Oreo Cookie” commercial, for example, features a little girl who is about four years old mimicking her grandfather’s actions in eating a cookie. Another commercial advertises the popular theme park, Six Flags Great Adventure. This commercial, entitled “The Six Flags Dancing Man,” features an elderly man dancing like an enthusiastic child. This relates to Stephen King’s idea in “My Creature from the Black Lagoon,” that adults long for and are often reminded of their childhood. Meanwhile, Rita Dove’s essay, “Loose Ends,” and Marie Winn’s essay, “Television Addiction,” each presents the great influence television has on life, often because of television’s great aspect of reality. Together, these ideas support the reasoning behind an advertisement’s attempt to sell abstract ideas. By using youth and old age in commercials, advertisers can sell nostalgia as a way of making commercials more memorable.
The rhetor of the article, For many restaurant workers, fair conditions not on menu, uses several rhetorical elements to construct her argument and build upon her ethos. She uses logos to expand her credibility and ethos, as well as to make her pathos statements more rational. She appeals to the reader’s sense of American patriotism and freedom to try to sway the opinions of the reader. The article’s main argument is that workers in the restaurant industry are being unfairly treated with their minimum wage.
A man gets up in the morning with nothing to do, why not play the Nintendo Switch to start your day? Want to have a good time and excitement with your family and friends? Nintendo Switch is what you want! It is easy to connect and disconnect. It is portable and can join other player with Nintendo Switch and can be played anywhere. Most of all, it is for all ages and they have a wide variety of games to choose from such as: Boxing, Dancing and Adventure games.
Do starving children have an effect on everyday life? Ethos, pathos, and logos shows in a modest proposal about how Starving Children affect America and solutions to the problem by John Smith.
“The Persuaders” by Frontline is about how advertising has affected Americans. It starts out by stating the problem of attaining and keeping the attention of potential customers. Balancing the rational and emotional side of an advertisement is a battle that all advertisers have trouble with. Human history has now gone past the information age and transcended into the idea age. People now look for an emotional connection with what they are affiliated with. The purpose of an emotional connection is to help create a social identity, a kind of cult like aroma. Because of this realization, companies have figured out that break through ideas are more important than anything else now. But there are only so many big
This essay is a perfect example of the importance of a thorough introduction to provide the reader with a concise synopsis of what the paper intends to covers. Had Gladwell excelled in both areas he neglected, this would be an extremely interesting, thought-provoking look into the world of advertising. Works Cited Gladwell, M. (1997). The New Yorker. Listening to Khakis.
Thomas Frank’s book entitled The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism takes a poignant look at the advertising world of the 1950’s and 1960’s, exploring how advertising played a role in shaping the next generation of consumers. Frank points out that he believes many misunderstand how important the key industries of fashion and advertising were to the shaping of our consumer culture, especially in getting Americans to rethink who they were. The industry of advertising was not conforming to the upcoming generation, instead the new consumer generation was conforming to the ideals of the advertising industry. Frank believes that the advertising and fashion industries were changing, but not to conform to the new generation, instead to shape a new generation of consumers.
Many veterans in the nation are struggling to find clothes, shelter, and food. Veterans from the Vietnam War until the most recent wars do not receive the appreciation and the care that they deserve. Due to the lost cause during the Vietnam War, many Americans turned away from supporting the military. After the Vietnam War, military antipathy was on the rise. In the 21st Century, organizations such as Wounded Warrior, Salvation Army, and Travis Manion Foundation are some of the few that provide aid for military veterans. Although someone can argue that veterans receive enough aid from these organizations, a great deal of veterans are sleeping in public shelter homes or wandering in the streets begging for food and clothes. Five Finger Death Punch produced
The author of this book Bruce Barton was a partner in a successful advertising firm during the 1920’s. This was a time when the industry of advertising was under going some major changes. These changes had a lot to do with a number of factors the first of which being the post war prosperity this meant people had more money than they ever had before. Another one of these factors had to do with the high number of teens who were now attending high school, this proved to be important because it created a whole other market which hadn’t existed before. One more factor was the advances made in transportation and communication, these advances allowed goods, people, and information to travel long distances relatively quickly intern allowing companies to grow large enough to spread their services nationally. Still another important factor was the invention of financing, this allowed people to pay for durable objects (large objects that would last a couple of years) with affordable installments or payments. But the biggest changes were the actual advertising practices themselves, many of which were pioneered by Barton and his associates, and didn’t become norms in advertising until after the release of Bartons book “The Man Nobody Knows” in 1924. This book served not only as a manual on how to advertise more affectively but also as an example of good advertising itself.
My overall thoughts on the story. What an incredible text, it is no surprise the story won an award. I loved the author's use of Logos, Pathos, and Ethos, as well as the overall flow of the text. Question one: It was a bit hard for me to pinpoint who I thought the narrator was, but I finally came to a conclusion.
Today everywhere one looks one is bound to be staring at an advertisement, whether it be a brand name sprawled across someone’s shirt or an ad on TV. It is almost impossible to escape the advertising as it is shoved in people’s faces through giant billboards and pop up ad on the computer. Almost everyone is obsessed with having the newest and greatest brand name item. Many people are trapped in the world of consumerism and materialism that is modern day America. The consumerist obsession is shown through metaphors and imagery in the poem “America” by Tony Hoagland, and through symbolism and color in the image “I Pledge Allegiance” by Taylor Rutledge. Both the poem and artwork show how consumerism has taken over America.
During the 19th and 20th century, America –mostly white collar, middle class Americans- saw a great increase in salaries and a huge rise in mass production which paved the way for the modern American consumerism which we know today. The advertising scene saw a dramatic boost during that period and tried to latch on to this growing pool of emerging consumers. Although only limited to print, advertising during this pivotal period showed panache and reflected American society
Across America in homes, schools, and businesses, sits advertisers' mass marketing tool, the television, usurping freedoms from children and their parents and changing American culture. Virtually an entire nation has surrendered itself wholesale to a medium for selling. Advertisers, within the constraints of the law, use their thirty-second commercials to target America's youth to be the decision-makers, convincing their parents to buy the advertised toys, foods, drinks, clothes, and other products. Inherent in this targeting, especially of the very young, are the advertisers; fostering the youth's loyalty to brands, creating among the children a loss of individuality and self-sufficiency, denying them the ability to explore and create but instead often encouraging poor health habits. The children demanding advertiser's products are influencing economic hardships in many families today. These children, targeted by advertisers, are so vulnerable to trickery, are so mentally and emotionally unable to understand reality because they lack the cognitive reasoning skills needed to be skeptical of advertisements. Children spend thousands of hours captivated by various advertising tactics and do not understand their subtleties.
“The average family is bombarded with 1,100 advertisements per day … people only remembered three or four of them”. Fiske’s uses an example of kids singing Razzmatazz a jingle for brand of tights at a woman in a mini skirt. This displayed to the reader that people are not mindless consumers; they modify the commodity for their use. He rejects that the audiences are helpless subjects of unconscious consumerism. In contrast to McDonald’s, Fiske’s quoted “they were using the ads for their own cheeky resistive subculture” he added. He believed that instead of being submissive they twisted the ad into their own take on popular culture (Fiske, 1989, p. 31)