Cardboard Winter Collection

The New Ark Mission and Aashray Adhikar Abhyan are two organizations which help homeless people in India. With their advertising campaigns they are trying to collect more means to further continue and expand their charitable work.

The first organization, The New Ark Mission, launched a campaign in order to collect old clothes for the poverty stricken people living in the streets. They chose to get their message across by mocking classical fashion advertising campaigns. The prints feature little girls dressed in clothes made out of cardboard, newspapers or potato sacks, with the words “Winter Collection” written over them. These images hit the nail on the head, and with proper placement such as in fashion magazines or billboards near shopping centers, their persuasive ability is intensified by the contrast the environment offers them. Applying to a person’s emotions, especially the feeling of guilt they make the reader/viewer think twice before fantasizing about new fashion. As if the imagery itself wasn’t enough, the bottom of the ads features the following text in fine print: “To 33.4% of people in Karnataka, garbage is fashion. Please donate your old clothes.”  It is my opinion that by not asking money but clothes, the organization presents itself as genuine in helping people in need.

The other organization, Aashray Adhikar Abhyan, appeals to the viewer’s emotions in a completely different way. Their ads show homeless people, all curled up in the form of a question mark. The text on the images reads: “37% of Indians live in poverty which puts a question mark on their future”. By using realistic scenes, these ads have the power to trigger both shock and sympathy, thus making them effective. However, when contrasted with the campaign of The New Ark Mission, these ads do lack in creativity, seeing that the information they are serving to the viewers is nothing they haven’t seen many times before.

Seeing that poverty and homelessness are a great problem in India, one must consider who the target audience for these campaigns is. If shown in India, these campaigns may not have the same effect as if they were shown in Western countries. If they are shown in the West, one must applaud the creators of these ads for finding the appropriate means to show the contrast between different lifestyles and thus evoke the feeling of wanting to help. An especially good way of doing this is using notions from Western culture, such as fashion, in order to make the subject of the ads closer to their audience.

The two campaigns are prime examples of how different approaches can be used in advertising in order to convey the same message. With charitable goals such as helping homeless people, the main requirement is to appeal to emotions, and if this is achieved, the campaign will, undoubtedly, resonate with a wide audience, if nothing else, by raising awareness.

Did you come from Japan?

As someone who is not at all interested in politics, and even less so in political cartoons, I had a very difficult task ahead of me regarding the choosing of my subject. Having had somewhat followed the recent disaster in Japan, I decided to analyze a cartoon which would be related to its consequences.

“Doubt”, a cartoon by Luojie from China, published online at www.politicalcartoons.com, addresses bans by different countries on food imports from Japan. It shows the Disney character Snow White being given an apple by her evil stepmother who is disguised as an old woman. The twist is obvious, while the old witch has skin that is green – a sign of something that is unnatural, Snow White is holding in her hand an issue of a newspaper which has “Japan nuclear radiation” written on its front page. Furthermore, she is holding a magnifying glass and asking the old witch where she is from.

The cartoonist’s idea was executed so as to resonate with a very wide and general audience. The animated characters are well known to all of us, and upon inspecting his other works, I have found that Loujie most often relies on well known concepts or sayings in his cartoons.

This cartoon can be seen in two ways. One of them, the more obvious one, is the author’s ironic take on the paranoia that has overwhelmed the Western world where extensive inspections of imported products from Japan are made. This is most obvious from the way in which the author chooses to alter the well known Disney imagery – adding the newspaper, the magnifying glass and last but not least, painting the old witch’s skin green.

However, one must also take into account the reason why this exact animated movie was chosen by the author. Its mocking and ironic tone does make a point, but one must also consider the fact that the apple in the fairy tale was indeed poisoned. This poses a question to which the readers must find the answer on their own: Is the whole deal blown out of proportion or do we need to consider every aspect of the story, even those which are not reported to us by our governments?

As already mentioned, by choosing a well known scene, Luojie manages to reach out to a wide audience, appealing to that which they are on familiar terms with in order to awaken their interest in the topic which may seem completely alien to them. For one must always keep in mind that what we eat is what we are. And if reports of radiation levels change on a daily basis, as they do at the moment without any explanation, it is our obligation to ourselves to seriously consider all the circumstances surrounding that which we consume.