Zales [Spec Ad]
When I was younger, in high school and early college, I used to read a lot of Maxim magazine. I eventually grew out of this and started making an active attempt to read more books and less articles on sexy dames and muscle cars. Still, as pretty much the first real magazine I read consistently, the advertising aesthetic stuck with me through the years. It’s amazing how effective an attractive woman can be in convincing men to do things - even if they’re just printed on a piece of gloss paper.
This idea came when I picked up a Maxim for the first time in a few years. I looked through, and was now more conscious of the advertising and its tone. I decided to try my hand at a simple “sex-sells” type ad, and this is what came out. It also happened to be December when I made this piece, so I decided to try to combine it with a holiday angle. I imagine the holidays are a perfect time to sell expensive jewelry to men scrambling to please their partners, so I combined an accessory which could fit a holiday theme (red and green jewels in this case) with one that could show off a nice pair of legs (an ankle bracelet). As I picked the specific product to focus on, I saw this exercise more as a marketing piece, advertising the store as a whole, rather than a piece whose purpose was to advertise a product assigned by the company. Just something meant to make the Zales name stick out in the readers’ heads and lure them into the store, even if they weren’t going with the specific advertised product in mind. Sneaky, no?
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