Advertising assessment: Learner response

1) Type up your feedback in full (you don't need to write the mark and grade if you want to keep this confidential).

WWW: A great assessment showing excellent knowledge, particularly of theory.

EBI: Q2 needs a little more on contexts. See this 12 marker like a mini-essay.

2) Read the whole mark scheme for this assessment carefully. Identify at least one potential point that you missed out on for each question in the assessment.

Q1 - Brand logo – serif font, links to monochrome colour scheme, style, sophistication, tradition. Understated, placed in bottom-left. Product not specified – about brand ‘feel’, aspiration
rather than actual product details.

Q2 - Representation of female desire arguably reflects female empowerment/third wave feminism. Female sexuality places power with women rather than men.

Q3 - The advert explicitly challenges the concept of racial essentialism – it is demonstrating the wide and varied versions of Black beauty across different places, genders and identities. The panel of 12 close-ups towards the end of the advert clearly demonstrates that the idea that different aspects of black culture are ‘all the same’ couldn’t be further from the truth.

3) Look at your answer and the mark scheme for Question 1 (Diamonds advert unseen text). List three examples of media terminology or theory that you could have included in your answer.

- Black tie as a phallic object (Mulvey) – being grabbed by female model.

- Female desire – woman as active sexual agent, empowered sexuality (third-wave feminism). Arguably reflects a changing representation of women post-1980s.

- Man as the hunted, looked-at object; objectification of men (Gill – female gaze).

4) Look at your answer and the mark scheme for Question 2. What aspects of the cultural and historical context for the Score hair cream advert do you need to revise or develop in future?

- Representation of women in the Score advert reflects the changing role of women in the 1960s to some extent. This is no longer the stereotypical 1950s housewife but still a reductive, exploitative, objectified representation of women.

- Emphasis on traditional hegemonic masculinity perhaps a reaction against the gains made by women during the 1960s culminating in the Equal Pay Act in 1970.

- Anchorage text in the Score advert reflects male insecurities in a changing world – repeated references to ‘men’ and ‘masculine’ in design, production and use of the product suggests an acknowledgment that hair cream was seen as a more female product in the 1960s.

5) Now look over your mark, comments and the mark scheme for Question 3 - the 9-mark question on Sephora Black Beauty Is Beauty. List any postcolonial terminology you could have added to your answer here.

 - Racial essentialism: This refers to the linking of a person’s cultural and racial heritage to a place of national origin. It is also used to suggest that people from a certain heritage are ‘all the same’ and therefore to make value judgements about people from certain backgrounds.

- Social and ethnic hierarchies: the belief that certain groups or races are superior to others.

- Cultural conviviality: This refers to the real-world multiculturalism and racial harmony that most people experience on a day-to-day basis. It is in stark contrast to the racial disharmony and binary view often presented by the media.