This is from a couple of years ago- Foundation U. was hanging new tarpaulins along the campus wall for its annual enrollment campaign. These boys, tying the tarps to the frames, are working students at the school, and they seem to be having a good time.
It’s advertising that they’re mounting- any institution has to advertise itself to stay in existence; first of all to let people know where it is and what it has to offer. But that’s just the raw information. The main point of advertising is to create an attractive image in the public mind, an image of yourself that people will indentify with, want to own, want to be a part of .
In this case, the tarp is proclaiming this: that if you become a part of our school, your dreams of the future will actually happen for you. And those dreams are pictured here- in the form of well dressed, very attractive and athletic young people, happy and serious at the same time, the kind of people you can imagine as the successful leaders of the future. The implication is that the school can help you to become one of them.
At F.U. we certainly thought it was a true picture of what we offer, but in form it took was standard advertising technique, very international in style. There’s nothing particularly local about it. It’s written in English, like most advertising here, and although the people it pictures are Filipinos that’s almost beside the point- from their clothes, their posture, their expressions, their arrangement in space, they are essentially Western in appearance.
But this is no conspiracy to Westernize the world; that has already happened, at least in pictures. This is in fact the kind of image that people everywhere find attractive and desirable; and advertising has to use what’s already in people’s minds to be successful. But it’s an international dream image, for pictures and magazines and movies, not the kind of dream that becomes reality- except perhaps in the minds of drug addicts and the insane.
In contrast, consider these boys hanging the tarpaulin. These are the actual young people who have to work and study hard to face a difficult world. They don’t match any ideal image in an ad, and they know it. But they don’t care. They have practical dreams to follow, and they can still afford to laugh.