By: Caroline Rhodes
The piece of visual media that I chose to analyze is an advertisement for Virginia Slims cigarettes in a 2000 issue of Life magazine. The advertisement spreads over two pages and has many feminine elements, such as the purple background and cursive font. Some of the larger words that are emphasized on the page include words about romance: such as romance, kiss, love. The woman is pictured looking very wistful, and at the same time very youthful. Her hair is blowing against the wind, and she is wearing a youthfully pastel colored silk blouse. Virginia Slims is an American brand of cigarettes known for being narrower, or slimmer, then the standard cigarette. This gives the cigarettes a more elegant appearance when they are in someone’s hand as they are smoking it, which could be why the cigarettes are geared more towards women. This advertisement shows smoking as feminine and glamorous, as seen by visual elements within the advertisement such as the depiction of the central woman, and the words that are presented to the left of her.
Upon further analysis of the marketing campaigns of Virginia Slims, it becomes clear that gearing their product towards women has been a consistent strategy throughout the lifecycle of the brand. In addition to primarily marketing towards women, the brand is also trying to target a younger sub demographic of women, generally around ages 18-35. This is consistent with the youthful appearance of the woman featured in this advertisement. Youthfulness juxtaposes many of the side effects of cigarettes, which makes these advertisements somewhat ironic when looked at through a more critical lens. For example, take this advertisement and compare it to the very famous photo publicized by the American Cancer Society, with the caption “Smoking is Very Glamorous.” This photo shows a more realistic vision of what smoking can do to people physically, such as accentuating the appearance of wrinkles and deep lines within one’s skin. The woman in the Virginia Slims ad has perfectly rosy cheeks, and hardly any wrinkles, which is an unrealistic vision of what smoking actually looks like. The name of their cigarettes makes it clear that they are targeting women with their marketing strategy. Some examples of this are “Superslims” and “Ultra Lights.” This type of branding could be trying to subtly emphasize the fact that cigarettes are appetite suppressants, and, due to modern beauty standards, women are often looking for weight-loss and diet aids when they are browsing through newspapers or magazines. The words on the page in the advertisement contribute to the feminine image that the product is trying to convey. The words that catch the viewers attention immediately are romance, kiss, and love. These are all very closely related to femininity especially within their target age demographic. Presenting cigarettes as related to youthful beauty is very contradictory, but this advertisement does a good job at convincing the viewer that the correlation is natural.
It is interesting how the same product, cigarettes, at its core, can be marketed in so many different ways to reach several different target audiences. The advertisement is clearly trying to expand the company’s target audience of young women by trying to place the consumer within the advertisement itself. If the consumer can identify with the woman in the advertisement, or at least aspire to be like her in some way, then they are more likely to purchase the product. This is similar to how Walter Benjamin describes optical unconsciousness as being able to portray visual technologies in a way that allows the consumer to view things in a different way than their original perception may have allowed them to. By placing themselves within the advertisement, the consumer sees their life with the product, and this product as a means to achieve some aspiration that they identify within the subject. The brand has a specific clientele that they want to attract, so the advertisement will reflect that subjectivity, which will then be transferred onto the consumer. This also relates to John Berger’s claim, in the book The Ways of Seeing, “we never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves?” In advertising, the viewer inherently compares themselves to the people in the advertisement. This could help them identify with the subject that is using a certain product or see someone who seems similar to them represented as having a certain problem.
In general, there are a few elements that I took away from this advertisement in Life magazine. I found that the targeted advertising towards women affects the representation of smoking, and how the company portrayed cigarettes as feminine and romantic. I also found that this advertisement was in stark juxtaposition to anti-smoking ads that I had observed throughout my childhood. The specific audience of Virginia Slims being young women lines up well with the youthful and feminine image presented within the advertisement. The periodic switch between largely positive portrayal of smoking and tobacco and the more health-concerned anti-smoking propaganda of the 2010s provides an interesting point of comparison. In conclusion, the portrayal of the woman in this advertisement as well as the words that the company chose to highlight next to her attempt to place the consumer within the advertisement itself, in such a case they would be able to envision themselves as a consumer of Virginia Slims.
Works Cited
Walter Benjamin, A Short History of Photography, Screen, Volume 13, Issue 1, Spring 1972, Pages 5–26, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/13.1.5
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin UK, 2008. Accessed 15 April 2024.
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