The Adverstising Lecture

Mountain Dew, Calvin Klein, Taco Bell, Best Buy, Macy's, American Eagle and Hollister. These are just a few of the companies we see ads for each and every day, continuously, throughout our lives. We can't get away from them. Pictures of food and models wearing brand name underwear are everywhere. Billboards, television commercials, newspapers and radio commercials are just a few places we see these numerous advertisements. It's actually getting really out of hand, and Jean Kilbourne points out this fact quite well.

Jean did an amazing job of combining pictures and video clips to emphasize her words. One part of the speech that impacted me was when she was speaking about what the ads might convey. Jean spoke of ads selling "...concepts of love and sexuality, of romance and success, and perhaps most important, of normalcy." The images she used with this section of the lecture really helped to show that modern advertisements really DO try and convince customers to buy their product or service.

Kilbourne not only enraptured the audience using different images to coincide with her argument, she also used several instances of humor to keep the attention that she had already gained. One example is when she quoted someone saying that advertisements do not affect them and they just tune them out. To this she says, "I hear this most often from people wearing GAP t-shirts, but that's another story." Another strategy she uses to keep people's attention is using interesting statistics. At the beginning of her lecture she showed a graph of how much advertising has increased between two years. Not only that, but she continued and said the average person would spend three years of their life watching television commercials. I found these to be interesting facts and made me want to hear more.

The speaker's tone and appearance really plays a factor in a presentation. Jean obviously was dressed comfortably enough, but was not so casual as to be considered "dressing down". By having a nice clean look, it helps to convey to the audience that the speaker knows what he or she is talking about. From the presentation, as seen online, I was not able to tell if she made eye contact throughout the presentation, but from the small clips that I saw of her she seemed to be doing well. Hand gestures were kept to a minimum but were still there which also helped to animate her thoughts about her presentation.

Kilbourne's transition from topics were quite fluid throughout her presentation. I can tell when a topic change is about to happen by the pause she takes after speaking about a certain topic and the sudden drop in her tone. A good example is when she says "To a great extent, advertising tells us who we are, and who we should be." at one minute at forty-six seconds into the presentation. This is the transfer from general advertising, to the discussion of dehumanizing woman's bodies.

Considering all of the aforementioned techniques, Jean Kilbourne's presentation was a prime example for anyone else looking to inform. The nice balance of spoken information with supplemental media was essential to conveying how she felt about her topic. Her appearance showed that she was serious about her topic and it worked well for her. A few clips of her audience even showed that they were paying attention. I say she did a very good job with her presentation.