The advertisement message, conveyed by the ‘Budweiser: king of beers’ print-ad is object-oriented. The depicted bottle of beer is meant to emphasize both: the promoted beverage’s coldness/tastefulness and the fact that it is specifically Budweiser that ‘reigns’ over the rest of the beer brands.
This is also the reason why the bottle’s lid is flipped upside down – it makes the bottle appear as if it was wearing a ‘crown’. The bottle of Budweiser beer is situated at the poster’s very center, which increases the extent of viewers’ emotional/cognitive comfortableness with the conveyed message even further.
The typed message, seen above the depicted object, thoroughly correlates with the poster’s visual semiotics, because it does encourage consumers to assume that in the ‘world of beer’, Budweiser dominates. The message’s strongly defined affirmativeness does not provide observes with much of a liberty to interpret the promoted idea’s ideological connotation.
The pragmatic subtleties of this particular advertisement-poster are concerned with the poster’s assumed ability to encourage beer-consumers to believe that by drinking Budweiser beers they become ‘empowered’. This, of course, increases the emotional appeal of the Budweiser beer-brand to American (Western) audiences even further, because they predominantly consist of people endowed with the so-called ‘Faustian’ (domination-seeking) mentality.
In conclusion, the print-ad ‘Budweiser: the king of beers’ represents the classical example of how advertisers go about combining explicit and implicit commercial messages in the single advertisement-piece, while remaining fully aware of what accounts for the targeted audience’s psychological anxieties.
Interpretation
The commercial appeal of the print-ad in question appears to reflect the designers’ awareness of the fact that the foremost psychological trait, on the part of the targeted audience members, is their deep-seated anxiety to dominate others. In its turn, this explains why the overt messages, conveyed by this poster (such as the logo ‘king of beers’), exploit the ‘appeal to masculinity’. Nevertheless, there are also a number of covert overtones to this particular appeal.
For example, the color of the poster’s background is dark-red, which is supposed to evoke in potential consumers the image of the ancient Roman god of war Mars. The ad’s vertically-aligned format is clearly reminiscent of the notion of hierarchy, which has traditionally been associated with the notion of masculinity.
Apparently, while exposed to this poster, male beer-lovers are expected to grow increasingly comfortable with the idea that by drinking Budweiser beer, they will be more likely to attain a social prominence in male-dominated (Western) societies.
Moreover, because the bottle of Budweiser beer, depicted in the poster, appears visually subliminal of an erect penis, the targeted buyers’ prolonged exposure to it will inevitably result in encouraging them to think that the consumption of Budweiser beer, on their part, is the direct pathway towards ensuring the undermined integrity of their sexual powers. This, of course, suggests that the ad in question cannot be discussed outside of the framework of the currently predominant socio-cultural discourse in the West.
Even though I do drink Budweiser beer occasionally, I find it hard relating to how the designers of this and went about promoting the brand. Partially, this has to do with the fact that, as it was mentioned earlier, there are clearly euro-centric overtones to it. In my opinion, this makes the concerned ad potentially capable of offending consumer-audiences that consist of non-Whites.
The ad also appears ill-suited to be promoted among female beer-consumers, especially if the latter happened to share the value of feminism. The reason for this is quite apparent – the designers of this particular print-ad made a deliberate point in representing the advertised object, as being sexually suggestive. At the same time, however, the designers of the above-discussed and can be well congratulated on having succeeded in exploring deep-seated anxieties, on the part of the targeted audience’s (White males) anxieties.
References
Budweiser: king of beers [Image]. (n.d). Web.