“The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life.” (Berger, 142) This statement rings true to an advertisement from GoDaddy.com that I saw on T.V. about a year ago (URL at bottom). In this advertisement the scantily clad Danika Patrick is caught speeding in her vintage Ford mustang down an abandoned desert road. The cop who busts her just so happens to be a woman, who just so happens to be a fan of GoDaddy.com. Who also wants to be a GoDaddy.com girl, and just so happens to want to prove it to Danika by tearing off her uniform and grinding the poor old mustang Whitesnake style.
Now to further analyze this advertisement you must understand that Danika Patrick is a former porn star. This status immediately plays to the men in the audience, who probably wouldn’t mind if Danika joined this police officer on top of the mustang. That being said the whole advertisement plays to the typical middle aged man, the type of man who wishes he were there on that deserted highway in the middle of nowhere. This ad seems to come all the way back from the Renaissance oil paintings. As Berger describes that the women weren’t just posing nude for the painter, they were posing for the man who would eventually buy the work of art. This advertisement gives the false allusion that if you subscribe to GoDaddy.com you may run into some good fortune, such as perhaps speeding by a sexy police officer willing to do a striptease on the hood of your corolla (lets face it you’re a family man you’ve got bills to pay, the mustang wont cut it). This brings up the concept of reality. Realistically on which kind of road could you patrol for two minutes (roughly the length of this ad) and not see a single car go by? Even if said road exists what kind of cop in their right mind would choose, out of all the busy roads to radar, that it might just be a good idea to check out the abandoned highway? Even if all this seems realistic to you the chances that Danika and this fan of hers meet up on this road just seems bizarre, and almost impossible.
This whole ad can be described by the ‘sex sells’ strategy. Which seems to be dominating the advertisement industry today, and has since the beginning of photo advertisement. The sad reality is that after watching this ad I checked out the site. I swear it was the car not this girls that did it for me. I swear.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 2008
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKQEpzJTUio
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