Analysis of a Magazine Advertisement

Thrown into Elle Magazine is a “Lollipop Bling” ad that attacks the senses with color and candy. Had anyone other than Mariah Carey been the center of attention, slinging candy and cleavage, they would have probably been arrested (picture a creep in a dark blue van without windows and the acrid scent of exhaust in need of a trip to the muffler shop). An air-brushed Carey wears gleaming ring pops as she sits on a pink cloud of teenage girl delight. This is clearly not an ad for women past their prime, or is it?

The last time I heard Mariah Carey having a breakthrough on the car radio was twenty years ago or maybe it was when I was at my mother’s house on her 54th birthday. Do teen girls even know who Mariah Carey is? Does she have that kind of sway over the target audience of the ad? Does my mother really want to wear candy rings and smell like a bomb-pop? I shudder to think. I had to dig deeper to really get the goods on “three irresistible flavor inspired fragrances.”

Sold exclusively at Wal-Mart for around thirty-five bucks, it’s clearly a product for teenage girls or twenty-somethings that haven’t quite made it out of the dance club scene. Carey is almost saying “you work too much” or “you study too hard, you should just relax and be more sexually active.” Carey is clearly not wearing any pants and her shirt is completely unbuttoned, all the while smelling like candy and adrift in some kind of creepy drug-induced ‘60s dreamland. Maybe I have the target audience all wrong; this is looking more and more like a strip-club flier. I wonder how many exotic dancers purchase these perfumes; maybe I should do some more research on that. Maybe I’ll just assume Carey is not attempting to get girls to dance naked and smell like candy.

All-in-all the ad is certainly inviting, with its bright colors and star power it entices you to relax and enjoy the sweeter things in life. Purple and pink bubbles rise and float around the page suggesting that maybe, just maybe, wearing this perfume will give you a bubbly personality and you’ll stick out from the drab gray faceless masses. Apparently candy is no longer just a treat, it’s also an accessory.

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It has also come to my attention (from various web sources) that the image used in this ad is actually just a Photoshopped version of an old promo picture of Carey.

Insight into a (many self-deprecating adjectives erased) middle-aged student.

These bones they fuckin’ clink and crackle, smearing the mud about. Buried below are the programmed television past times, scratching at our too little, too lates. Technological daydream distractions swallow you up and spit you out in your mid-thirties.

The fear and urgency swells up to a rage – you realize the only skill set you’ve acquired is how not to drunk text your ex-girlfriend at four a.m. on a Monday morning. Your penniless fortune of plastic and steel, DVDs and mp3 players piled high in the corner, sold off by the pound at two percent of the original cost.

84 billion channels to watch and nothing’s on, but you watch anyway. Drooling your way through four-hour-long-variety-show-marathons where they spackle on the makeup, and everyone sounds like Christina Aguilera on methamphetamines…

Facebooking non-existent words in run-on sentences about your 3-D, Blu-Ray, laser-guided edition of the 2015 remake of “Encino Man.” You doze off on your computerized couch as your robotic cat malfunctions, sparks, and sets fire to your living room rug. 

The firemen sit and watch as you crisp alive, because you forgot to pay a parking ticket from six years ago.

Go BOLDLY, fruitful friggin’ youth, and don’t forget to write your god damn congress man. As if the congress actually turned someone into a man... hallelujah! Jesus was born!