An advertisement on the Explore Howard website caught my eye this morning as I scanned the site for something newsworthy to post on. I'm not an advertising major but I enjoy studying the semiotics of print and T.V. ads for their hidden meanings. What does this ad say to you?Ok you've got a black woman holding a red bag, nothing out of the ordinary here. Shop the VC the ad reads, value & convenience very close to home. To me, the ads reads shop local, keep the village centers alive, don't hit up the big boxes.
Then it hit me. The ad for Columbia only lists six village centers! So what if you live in Owen Brown, Oakland Mills or Long Reach? Don't they have village centers as well? To me this ad says, stay out of East Columbia, it sucks, the village centers are dead. We've let developers come in and fuck them up and now we'd rather you didn't even bother going. Go to these upscale village centers instead.
Take Wilde Lake village center for example. What could that woman possibly have in that bag that isn't seafood, hair care products or alcohol? Would you rather her shop at a village center without a grocery store or a village center without a computer shop? The image of the red bag suggests the kind of shopping she could only do at big box or the Columbia mall.
So am I reading too much into this? Does the ad scream bias to anyone else, or should I put my contacts in before something hazardous happens?
3 comments:
Jack,
These six VCs are owned by Kimco. They're promoting their properties, not saying "shop Columbia's VCs in general."
Yeah, the inclusion of Wilde Lake does kind of argue against it being a selectively "upscale" thing. The two thoughts I have:
- The big boxes are all in East Columbia anyway, so it's harder to make the case for better proximity.
- The village centers listed are those that helped pay for the ad.
And the second might derive from the first.
But in any case, it's hard to read the ad without snickering. I lived between two of the VCs listed for five years, walked to both of them frequently, and I don't recall ever buying anything but food or drink.
I'm doing research for Midday at WYPR on Howard County Executive Ken Ulman. He's going to be on the show in a few days. Know of any talking points I should tell them to touch on?
-Ty
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