Ad analysis

Adam Dahou

Professor Craig Payne

Composition I

15 January 2020

Wake Up the Red in Your Hair

What do you do in the morning when you go to the bathroom? What do you do when you get out of the shower every day? More precisely what do you see when you look at yourself in the mirror? It's simple, you focus on your beauty and your flaws. The majority of people think of changing an aspect of their body that they do not like, such as their nose, weight or even the color of their hair. Indeed, the advertisements that are around us in magazines or on the TV show us, women and men, without any flaws. Every day, we are surrounded by images of elegant and slim bodies, beautiful and wavy hair, pretty and perfect faces and etc. These images, therefore, remain in our heads throughout our existence. Advertisers imply that if people use their product, they will look like the person in the picture.

The advertisement “Sunsilk Red Color Dye” issued on March 17, 2016 in People magazine portrays the famous model Emily Seymour promoting a dye color product for hair. Sunsilk is a famous brand, which aims to sell its products to sophisticated women, intellectuals and those interested in fashion. In this ad, the first thing that attracts the attention of the audience is the red color that dominates the whole image. We then see the product presented by the advertisement, a hair dye, located in the foreground in front of a woman placed in the background. This woman is taken in close-up but does not fully enter the picture because the most important thing remains the product, so she is portrayed slightly at the back and right near the product. The product is a red dye for the hair, so the model also is displaying a red colored, voluminous and silky hair. We can see that the woman's gaze is directed towards the product. The slogan "Wake up the red in your hair" is written at the top left of the image, just above the product. It is written in white as the brand name Sunsilk. This advertisement explicitly sells a hair coloring product, but it implicitly sells the image of the ideal woman and success.

An American weekly magazine of models, celebrities and interesting stories, People has become one of the popular magazines across the US and involves different categories of and age of audience. This advertisement itself is directed to trigger the feelings and emotions of women who want to be beautiful and successful. It targets women who wish to have resplendent hair. Women who want to change their hair color or women who have lost their hair color dream of looking like this dazzling woman thanks to the color of their hair. The age group targeted by this advertisement ranges from 20 to 40 years. The need to get a product from this range and restore beauty by changing the color of the hair is more felt in women of this age group. At this age, women want to look as beautiful as possible whether it is to look elegant at work or to please their surrounding people in everyday life. They want to seize all possible opportunities, to accomplish all the goals they have set in their lives, and that includes physical beauty. They hope to be able to evolve constantly and become ever more beautiful. This ad says to women of this age group: we have the solution if you want to look beautiful and draw attention to yourself, just use this product.

This advertisement “Sunsilk Red Dye Hair Color” attempts to appeal to the audience with the effective use of logos. Utilizing the textual phrases, sometimes the ads can deceive their audience and most often lead to delusional interpretations. The phrase of the ad "Wake up the red in your hair” contains phrases that can easily hook the audience’s attention and delude people that this product is the best. The slogan "Wake up the red in your hair" also contributes to this impression of accessibility since the fact of "waking up the red" implies that it is already present in the hair of all women and that it is enough to make it appear. There are a lot of things that drive people to buy a dye, and this announcement has identified the main aspects. The written promises of the ad say that the product is “waterproof”, which is also one way that it grasps the attention of the audience. Being water-resistant, is one of the main criteria that consumers consider when buying hair dye products. It is suitable for women who are in contact with the rain or who do not want to use protective caps when showering.  Sunsilk promises that the product will not lose color because they claim that their product will remain in the hair, regardless of the nature of the hair and the type of shampoo used.

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