Week Ten: Advertising

I realized this kind of parody advertisement has been done to death on the internet, but I've been seeing so many Christmas related diamond ads that I decided to choose inspiration over originality. Sorry.

The ad I put together is a parody (obviously) of the ads by jewelry retailers to sell diamonds. The message of those ads, often, is that the only way to show you love a woman is with diamond jewelry. In the end, these advertisements put pressure men to only use their finances to show how they feel (thereby reinforcing their societal roles as unemotional males) and portrays women as only interested in money and frankly, as I show in my spoof, stupid for not "understanding" different ways people show each other love.

Most diamond advertisements are aimed at heterosexual men who are in pretty new relationships (less than 2 years, probably). The advertisements often draw on the heavy symbolism of diamonds as a physical object; they are the hardest mineral and likely to survive anything. I saw one ad on television recently that used the slogan "There are only two things that last longer than time..." implying that one is love, and one is a diamond. That television commercial, oddly enough, seemed to be aimed at women rather than men. It is just as important for diamond retailers to convince women of the importance of diamond jewelry as a physical sign of love so the men in their lives feel pressured to buy them.

The audience of my spoof is the group of men described above, but I wrote the copy as if it were coming from the perspective of not just the jewelry retailer but also the stereotypical greedy women. It drives home the point that the symbolism and cash value of diamonds are the only way to express feelings of love, that relationships without this particular physical symbol are meaningless, and that both these facts seem to work out for jewelry retailers just fine, thank you very much.