Tow #10 - Geico Advertisement

Geico utilizes more characters at one time than probably any other commercial company in the history of business marketing. If one turns on the Television tonight one could see an ad starring their Gecko, Cavemen, or the pile of cash. Or maybe all three, to effectively captivate the audience into hearing them talk about their product.

The gecko first appeared in 1999 during a Screen Actors Guild strike that made the use of live actors impossible. In the gecko’s first TV add, he pleads for people confusing him, the gecko, with “GEICO” to stop phoning him. The gecko speaks with an English accent, because it would be unexpected, which draws the audience of the comercials in, and makes them interested in their product.

These modern cavemen have somehow escaped death, and avoided extinction while developing a fine taste for tennis, plasma TVs, and other modern things foods and activities. They are insulted by GEICO’s ad tagline, “So easy, a caveman can do it.” This technique adds satire to the advertisement. Reversal is used, and Geico shows a scene of cavemen doing normal things to draw attention to their adds.

Starting in 2008, GEICO has aired a series of TV ads featuring two paper-banded stacks of U.S. bills with a pair of big, buggy eyes on top. The pile of Cash, who never says anything, just sits and stares at people set to an obnoxious remix of a Rockwell/Michael Jackson song, “Somebody’s Watching Me.” This is a joke, that involves a literal stack of money watching a customer of another insurance agency. This, just like the gecko joke, is unexpected, and draws in the audience attention.

An actor asks the familiar question, “Could switching to Geico save you 15% or more on car insurance?” He then follows up with a rhetorical question: “Does Charlie Daniels play a mean fiddle?” or “Did The Waltons take way too long to say goodnight?” The use of rhetorical questions draws the audience in, while other boring ads makes their audience tune out.

IRB intro post #2 - Ten Green Bottles

Ten Green Bottles was written in 2004 by Vivian Jeanette Kaplan. The book was published in English, and translated into several different languages such as German, Hungarian, and Italian. It is the true story of a Jewish family that escaped from Nazi-occupied Vienna to Shanghai under Japanese rule. The book is told from the viewpoint of the author's mother and starts in 1921. Gerda Karpel is a 5-year-old Jewish girl living in Vienna in 1921. She comes from an upper middle-class family. The book starts with the birth of Nini's brother, Willi, to the death of Gerda's father shortly after the birth. The book then discusses day to day life from the viewpoint of a Jewish girl growing up in Vienna. It talks about the political instability caused after the assassination of Engelbert Dollfuss and the suppression of democracy after it. This book seems especially interesting to me because I am from a Jewish Heritage, and many of my relative that lived in the 20th century have similar stories to this one. I hope to learn more about the European Jewish Culture that my family shares in my duration of reading this book. 

TOW #9 - Ernest Hemingway's "Camping Out"

Ernest Hemingway’s essay Camping Out starts with Hemingway describing with how going camping can be either a relaxing vacation or a terrible experience based on your knowledge on the subject.  He outlines points that can make a camping trip horrible to a novice, leading the reader to believe that he has done this many times himself and he truly is an expert. Hemingway’s protagonist in this story seems to be Wilson, the hunter who lives and breathes the great outdoors. The story to juxtaposes another character Macomber to Wilson, and obviously, Wilson is the favored in that comparison due to his outdoorsiness. However, at the end of the story Wilson breaks the code to which he lives by as he hunts down buffalo in a car, a cowardly, and indisputably illegal act. Wilson is by no means perfect.

Two literary techniques are in play throughout the story that enliven the action and embellish Hemingway’s otherwise minimal descriptive passages. The first is onomatopoeia, and is best exemplified by “whunk,” the noise Macomber’s bullet makes as it hits the lion (p. 22, 33), and “carawong,” the noise Wilson’s high-velocity “big gun” makes as it fires at game (p. 26, 34). Hemingway’s usage of these terms helps the reader imagine the noises and brutality of the hunt. The second technique Hemingway employs is simile and metaphor. The most notable example occurs in Wilson’s thoughts when Macomber asks if they should leave the wounded lion, “Robert Wilson, whose entire occupation had been with the lion and the problem he presented, and who had not been thinking about Macomber except to note that he was rather windy, suddenly felt as though he had opened the wrong door in a hotel and seen something shameful” (p. 24). This simile demonstrates Wilson’s shock at hearing Macomber voice such cowardly ideas. Macomber would rather leave the lion to suffer or risk someone else running into the lion and possibly being killed than face up to hunting it down and finishing what he started.