Ideological Ads Analysis - "No Child For Sale"
“No Child For Sale” is published by Kbs+ for the organization World Vision which is an evangelical Christian humanitarian aid, development, and advocacy nonprofit organization. The one who came up with the concept of this ad is Alyssa Greffen and Braeden Laverty.
It's quite easy to tell at first glance what message the ad is trying to tell the audience. You see a young girl on her bed reading a picture book and beyond her bedroom, there leads to another space where you see another young girl sewing loads of fabric. One is fitting the image of what a kid usually does while the other, not so much. With the bottom left corner, you see the phrase “Not every child gets a childhood” so at this point, we can connect the dots and say that the girl sewing is most likely not helping out with chores but rather is working compared to the girl at the front relaxed in her room reading a book like a typical kid. Of course, the fact that viewers are able to easily receive the message is thanks to the well done concept of how elements are used with each other.
Going back to taking a quick glance of the overall piece, the first thing that pops up would be the contrast between the light foreground and the dark background. The effect would then make the eye go back and forth, trying to catch further details in order to comprehend why the contrast is there. Personally, my eyes decide to observe the dark first. In the dark, there is a room illuminated with only a desk lamp which emphasizes on the elements near it which is a kid sewing piles and piles of fabrics. From that room, the only other thing that stands out is the bright pink fabric because of how out of place it looks compared to the rest of the room’s muted palette. Visually wise, the usage of dull color can make things look boring or depressing and the color usage fits well with the concept of the young girl doing menial tasks instead of playing around. Afterwards, this pink fabric led my eyes to the foreground by using the ribbon lines as a way to guide the viewer to see another part of the piece. At the other end of the line, your eyes are brought to a typical kid room with pastel color and toys on the ground. Not much to mention about the reading kid’s room until you realize that the blanket she is using is connected back to where the sewing girl is. This is as if to insinuate that the product the reading girl (and perhaps even for most of us) is using is made by other young kids that should've been able to enjoy childhood but can’t because they must work to earn money. Anyway, all these techniques to point out the disparities between one kid to another due to poverty in certain countries.
To close, I believe that, because the message of the advertisement is so clear, it has to be a hegemonic reading experience for everyone else. There's no way to get it wrong when you observe long enough at the composition of overall image and the written texts. I really think that this is a good advertisement in the sense of how it successfully catches our attention and conveys the intended message by appealing to our humane side. While this text has mostly been in the analytic side of the ad, the actual message is quite important to keep in mind that child labor still exists in many parts of the world and that at the very least, we shouldn't take our lives for granted because many others doesn't necessarily have what we have.
