As the background and name of my blog is pertinent to the HBO series Game of Thrones, I feel obligated to have a post that has to do with a trailer.
Trailers for shows such as A Game of Thrones have one goal to make the target audience watch the show. They put in dramatic scenes in an order that the show does not display them in but make sense in a very dramatic way. For example, when Eddard Stark chops off the soldier's head for deserting the Night's Watch, the clips shown in the trailer are very dramatically cut together with the conversation in the background, making the show look very interesting and, sorry that I can't think of a better word, but dramatic. The show caters to the action lovers with the sword fighting and epic battles but also appeals to the drama crowd with the twisted storyline and plot twists. A poignant catchphrase, "Winter Is Coming" makes the show seem serious and foreboding.
The message that the trailer is trying to convey to me, the audience, is that no matter who I am, this show is awesome to watch because it has cool, dramatic fighting scenes, mixed with passionate love scenes, and every kind of scene one can imagine, and its all crammed into one great show with a great catchphrase. And the trailer is mostly right, it is an awesome mix of TV show genres, which I watch often. However, it can be stressful to watch and a healthy dosage of one episode per day is recommended.
Advertisements made by the Old Spice company, which sells men's deodorant, are known for being ridiculous. From featuring the freakishly buff Terry Crews, to the suave Isaiah Mustafa, they have made dozens of commercials which seem to have the same purpose: to be as weird as possible. This commercial is trying to sell Old Spice bar soap by hiding it in a watermelon which is disguised as a basketball, in the setting of a locker room. Also, there is a funny jingle which conveniently says nothing about the soap except that you should use it if you're "playing to win."
But how are these commercials so attractive for people. What makes people want to buy Old Spice soap? Heck if I know, but I know that it makes me interested in Old Spice bar soap. One technique being used to sell the product is the need to achieve. Old Spice says that people that are in it to win it are the people that use their bar soap, so therefore, it is needed to achieve victory.
So you can tell to a point what Old Spice wants to convey with this ad, by using the first sentence, but everything else seems to make no sense. It's weirdly creative and it makes you laugh. And this seems to adhere to the rest of the commercials by Old Spice, in that it aims to make people laugh. In a way this then makes Old Spice bar soap seem like a good product. It has nothing to do with basketballs or watermelons but the confidence on the man's face shows that he loves his Old Spice soap.
A value that this appeals to is manliness. The commercial shows how manly this manly man is by depicting him cutting open things and holding a basketball and stuff.
There is so much that this commercial omits and yet it is still awesome and I remember the jingle and everything. One, it has nothing pertaining to the soap itself, what it smells like, or anything about its performance. What it does do is say that it is for competitive people and its the soap you've been smelling for. But that is it. All i can say is "Wait... What?" and then watch it five more times.
The events in Boston and Cambridge that we all know about led to the death of someone who didn't have a connection to the bombing. Sunil Tripathi, a 22 year old Pennsylvania native attending Brown University was pulled from the water near India Point Park in Rhode Island by the Brown University Crew Team. He had gone missing in March and was last seen on March 15. And why was he dead? There is no sure cause for his death and his time of death is not known. However, after the Boston bombing occurred and every news corporation in America, as well as websites such as Reddit and Facebook, were searching for info, someone pointed their finger at him. By releasing photos of the suspect on April 15 to Reddit to see if anyone recognized him, someone reported that the missing Tripathi looked like the suspect in the baseball cap. After this Twitter was buzzing with the name and it landed the Twitter top trends list. After the suspects were found, and it became obvious that Sunil had no connection to the bombing, his family had already been bombarded by television inquiries and social media linking Tripathi to the bombing and blaming him as one of the suspects. The ridiculous speed of a dangerous rumour via social networking spells danger, as misunderstandings like this happen. Using these mediums such as Reddit to find criminals isn't wise, because it seems to have the potential of putting innocent people like Sunil in the spotlight. The online news coverage on Reddit was distorted by the "dangerous speculations" that the people on the website made about Sunil. The facts proposed by the released photos were distracted by Reddit as the conversation turned to Sunil Tripathi's name, which then spread to one of the most used social networking sites in America, Twitter, where rumors can spread like wildfire.
