Southern Comfort

Southern Comfort

"The old ball-and-chain" is a phrase that many Americans are familiar with. Oftentimes we imagine it spilling forth from the lips of some distressed, fatigued, overworked man who is with his nagging wife. It is this image that the advertisers for Southern Comfort are trying to reproduce. They want the person looking at the ad to sympathize with the man in the image, the man dragging his imaginary "ball-and-chain". We associate the ball and chain with oppression, hard labor, and unfairness. These connotations are probably derived from the images that we have seen in old prison movies where the convicts are forced to work the fields, shackled by a ball and chain. Let us back up for a moment though and look at just how this Southern Comfort ad takes us from the image of a man to the labor intensive fields of old prison movies.

There are many denotations in this ad. There is a man, three women, bags, sides of buildings, a chair, writing on a window, a sidewalk-like walkway, a bottle of Southern Comfort, some white lines, and two lines of copy. The first line of copy reads, "Your free time may have changed. Your drink doesn't have to." The second line reads, "Hang on to your spirit." There is also a division in the ad, the top two-thirds of the ad being the photo image and the bottom one third being a black background.

How is it that the advertisers take our mind from the image on the page to the thoughts that progress in our head? To figure this out let us more closely examine the images, or signs, that have been presented to us. Let us first examine the image of the man in the ad. He is dressed casually "preppie", wearing khakis and a blue, collared shirt. Tucked under his left...

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...line of copy, "Hang on to your spirit", stands out from the rest of the copy because it looks like individually cut-out words which stand out on the contrasting black background. Our mind associates these cut-outs as looking like the print found in newspapers or magazines. By using the cut-and-pasted words the advertisers invoke the "ransom" myth. This myth is something that we have seen in numerous movies, the villain/kidnapper of the film using cut-out letters and words so as to prevent being traced. In this sense, one can see this line of copy as a warning. The advertiser is warning the consumer not to let what happened to the man in the ad happen to them, not to let the man's bachelor spirit be overtaken by a demanding woman. They are imploring the consumer to hold on to their freedom found in their old way of life, which has been linked to the Southern Comfort.