comp this!
They seem innocuous enough, but comp ads are a delicate art too long ignored by serious critics. In this penetrating analysis, we strive to uncover the hidden meanings, the subtle implications and the undiscovered secrets to their failure—or success.
This ad lives up to its “curiously satisfying” slogan. For who anticipated that the “Asian Baptist Student Koinonia” would be so playfully PoMo? In the great Pop Art tradition, the ABSK has appropriated a classic image of American consumerism and turned it to its own purposes. The point of this endlessly reproduced parody is not, of course, to sell breath mints, but to advertise values antithetical to materialism itself.
Rest assured, ABSK, that the irony has not escaped us. Unlike the Altoids mint, a throw-away product of the twentieth century, Bible studies have, for better or worse, long been the “original celebrated” pastime of Western culture. But the ad’s clever premise is potentially jeopardized by its deeper implications: Are we to assume that Bible Studies, too, may be commodified for our consumption? Does the ad’s success rely, at least in part, on its prominent display during “shopping period”? This ad may have “made anew” an old trope with refreshing self-consciousness. But we wonder whether it is self-conscious enough.
This pleasingly purple ad pretends to a childlike innocence that its counterparts have not mastered. There is no greater cliché than an angry father threatening to send his child to military school unless he cleans up his act. The ad’s ingenuity is in taking this threat literally. Clean toilets, it proclaims with teenage exuberance, and your potential to “party on” is endless. Sweep the floor, the poster cries out, and earn $9.85/hr to finance “excellent” times.
The ad no doubt taps into our collective nostalgia for past times, a Golden Age when threats were “bogus,” work was easy and life was one big party. For many, this time persists into the college years, sometimes lasting well into “adulthood.” This ad perceptively recognizes, however, that for we Harvard students this Golden Age is and always will be a tantalizing fiction, the teasing stuff of Hollywood movies and Dorm Crew dreams.
Yellow is clearly this season’s color of choice, but the normally cheery hue takes on gruesome overtones in this ill-conceived ad. The poster’s central image of a black Jewish star on a solid yellow background cannot help but evoke memories of the dreaded armbands worn by Jews in Nazi-era Europe. Such associations must surely have been unintended by the “Harvard Students for Israel,” but the comp ad’s blazing slogan gives the thoughtful viewer pause. Did the Zionist organization mean to make light of the conflict in the Middle East, sporting with Israel’s fears in the proposition, “Israel: It’s safe to come”? Or is the ad intended to elicit sympathy for Israel’s plight by elevating our hopes and then dashing them to smithereens in the depressing parenthesis, “(to our meetings at least)”? Whatever the intention, this ad leaves a sour taste in the mouth, making us wish that the Harvard Students for Israel had not, like so many before them, gotten lost in the wilderness of ambiguity.
How does an “underground” organization advertise itself to the mainstream? Is the mere act of putting up a poster a kind of selling out? This record hospital comp ad explores these paradoxes with verve, maintaining a careful balance between avant-garde aloofness and general-audience accessibility.
To begin, the ad arrests us with its powerful imagery, a dramatic over-exposed visage brooding with anger or desire. The picture’s deep eyes draw us in; sure enough, the entire face becomes a vehicle for expression, communicating not just the emotions that inform “noise,” “punk” and “hardcore,” but also the introductory meeting time for the campus radio station. Lest the poster prostitute itself as mere “infotainment,” however, it carefully undermines conventional forms, eschewing capital letters and most useful punctuation. The result is a kind of aphasic word-pile of nouns and prepositions that emerge from our world but do not resemble it, compelling us with their strange and rhythmic beauty.