Good Example Of Toyota Rav-4 Advertisement Analysis Essay

The commercial promoting the new car model produced by Toyota features in the foreground four young people taking a selfie with an ostrich with the desert and other people in the background. One can The commercial in question is a quality example of marketing because it combines visual elements with emotional appeals and exploits many symbols to work specifically on the audience it targets.
The primary target audience of this advertisement consists of young people who long for setting out for an adventure and having a good time with their peers. They feels the urge to explore the world, and their youthful impulsiveness might even prompt them to set out in a sudden journey. The narrative structure of the ad is quite eloquent in terms of the target audience. The scene of the advertisement allows to see that the young people find themselves in an unusual setting, so this element corresponds to the typical youthful desire to escape from the dull routine. This unusual setting might even evoke a wild dream – a long journey to an exotic country in a company of good friends. The values which the creators of the advertisement put forth support these suggestions.
The visual perspective of this ad is quite interesting in terms of contrast. The picture is basically divided into two parts: the upper part, representing the sky, is bright blue, and the lower part, representing the desert, is beige. The contrast suggested in the background is preserved in the main objects on the ad: the beige desert is the background for colorful items like people, the car, the ostrich birds while the bright blue sky is the back ground for the simple white slogan “How Far Will You Take It”. It is interesting that, despite being of neutral color, slogan actually attracts attention and summarizes well the contents of the lower part of the ad. It is the bright blue background that makes this seemingly neutral slogan stand out. One can say that, in terms of look, the designers of the ad did a very good job: due to the sharp color contrast on the two different levels of the ad attracts the audience's immediate attention. This peculiar color arrangement enforces the contrast between the foreground and the background of the ad.
The color composition of the ad takes the analysis to the important issue of symbols. Since in the visual ad the advertisers have only little space in their disposal, they have to work in way which will allow them to put the greatest number of expressive signs in the smallest amount of room. In this regard, symbols and connotations become very handy because they allow to evoke many emotional meanings by one item. The analyzed commercial is can be viewed as a quite illustrative example in this regard. First and foremost, one should consider why the bright blue sky with a single white slogan on it takes up almost half of the picture. Apart from the fact that brightness of the sky actually helps to attract the viewers' attention in contrast to the neutral beige background, it brings about connotations which mean to exercise a suggestive influence on the audience. The sky is a symbol of high achievement and breath-taking dreams. The bright sky of the advertisement looks very inviting: it calls young people to forget their troubles and follow their dreams, respond to their challenges and live their lives to the fullest. This symbolic meaning of the bright sky goes very good in tandem with the white inscription “How Far Will You Take It” because both of them signal of a challenge: the sky is a non-verbal sign and the inscription is a verbal sign.
The advertisement in question is also notable for its use of the metaphor. In the picture , near the young people taking selfie, the viewer spots an ostrich bird, and there is something that looks like an ostrich farm in the background with more birds of this kind on the premises.
The birds seem just a fun and witty element of the picture until the viewer spots the inscription about the recent Toyota innovation – Bird's Eye View Camera. Thus, the bird in the foreground becomes some sort of a symbolic pun: the owners of the car not only own a good quality car by itself, but they also have an innovative camera to go with it.
Another symbol which the advertisement exploits is the typical behavior of the target audience. The young people in the picture are taking a selfie with the car and the desert on the background. Taking a selfie is the typical behavior of young people when they are having a good time with their friends. The commercial thus references this typical behavior in order to establish an associative connection between it and the product it promotes. By doing this, the creators of the Toyota ad achieve what most of the advertisers seek to achieve – inducing the audience to buy the product based not only on its objective qualities, but rather on the emotions and subconscious values that go with it.
The commercial analyzed in this essay exploits several kinds of longing that might be most pressing for the target audience. First, it emphasizes the desire for affiliation: there are four people having fun together. Another desire is to realize one's dreams. The exotic setting of the ad suggests that the car it promotes becomes very handy in realizing one's dreams and going for one's wildest fantasies and explore new places. Finally, it obviously appeals to the simple, yet powerful desire to have fun: the facial expressions of the people in the foreground clearly suggest that.
Given the arrangement of the elements of the ad, one can conclude that they are combines with each other in a way that they produce a unified message. Due to this trait, the visual component of the commercial perfectly matches the verbal slogan and thus renders the advertisement comprehensible and appealing.