Advertising’s Exploitation of Environmentalism

This assignment asks you to study advertising’s exploitation of environmentalism in order to sell products. Specifically, you are asked to select and examine the various ways advertising invokes environmental values and natural imagery. The assigned readings will help us to conduct a semiotic analysis of these ads–what do the images represented in the ad(s) suggest to you about the American culture at large or a specific segment of our culture? And to what extent can you identify and apply the techniques discussed in the readings to your ad analysis The one restriction is that you use CURRENT “green” advertisements. Cleaning products, hybrid automobiles, even some travel ads are just a few to consider.

NOTE: Your essay must reference (in a thoughtful way) at least two to three of the assigned readings from Signs of Life and include a works cited page.

Write an analysis of (1-2) green marketing commercials/advertisements (2018-2020) that present the possession of consumer goods as ways to connect with nature and achieve the simple life. Consult both Japp and Japp’s “Purification through Simplification” (128) and Julia B. Corbett’s “A Faint Green Sell: Advertising and the natural World” (235) to develop your response and include specific visual detail from the ad/commercial. Your thesis should address this question: How effectively does the ad you’ve chosen equate the product with nature and the simple life?

Your essay must reference (in a thoughtful way) at least two to three of the assigned readings from Signs of Life and include a works cited page.

Make sure that your argument is focused with a clearly articulated thesis statement and that this statement appears somewhere in the first 1-2 paragraphs. Your thesis should name/identify your ad and the degree to which you find the commercial  effective/ineffective or even problematic in it’s use of one or several of the concepts from our readings.

Support all assertions with SPECIFIC VISUAL EVIDENCE/DETAILS  from the advertisement/commercial. Don’t overlook the text in favor of the images, and don’t overlook the images in favor of the text. Make sure that you discuss all aspects of the ads which are relevant to your analysis.

It may help to first think about the target audience for a particular advertisement