Moving away from the beauty aisle, other products and services still fit the bill for high-speed products and services. Delta Airlines has recently introduced Breezeway (#4), providing “quicker boarding for premium travelers.” Breezeway is “a dedicated boarding lane that lets First Class, BusinessElite®, and Medallion® passengers board at their leisure.” By specifying the groups of people that Delta's Breezeway service applies to, they are demonstrating both psychographic and income segmentation. Next are two (or four, depending on how you look at it) billboards found online from a 2006 ad campaign for Roedtor knives (#5). Both advertisements are split between two billboards - one has half of a cow on each, the other half of a fish.
Splitting the animal between two billboards was a very witty move for the advertising company to represent how well the knives work, cleaning cutting the subject/meal in half, and if a knife works well then it works fast. This brings us to the last advertisement of the group showcasing the speed of a product - a Western Union ad (#6) also found online (also a 2006 ad campaign). In this advertisement, the background is yellow with black text (company colors), and the copy reads “THERE”. The “T,” however is faded while “HERE” is in black, a great contrast to the yellow. The faded “T” represents the speed at which Western Union is able to wire money - so fast that it's "here" before it left "there".
Continuing the “speed” motif, there is another kind of speed seen in advertising - the time necessary to see a promised effect or to make the product's intended result. Of 20 possible advertisements, 12 can be filed under this type of speed. Again, several are beauty products, but most of the ads are for food, as well as a few for over-the-counter medications. The first beauty product shows a woman in the ad, but I believe Aquafresh White Trays (#7) are meant to be a unisex product. The text asks “how would you rather whiten your teeth?” and presents a chart comparing Aquafresh's product with a similar product, Crest Whitestrips. The chart shows that the Aquafresh White Trays whiten 25% faster than Crest's Whitestrips, and the ad then goes on to say “…start seeing results in just 3 days, full results in 7.” Like many other products already presented, and some that have not yet been covered, this product works significantly faster than previous products like it and, allegedly, faster than the competition as well.
Two other beauty products with expedited results can be seen in advertisements #8 and #9. While the products seen in ad #8 are sold separately, the advertisement shows them together and suggests using them together as well. In this ad, the signifier is the dual-product (Bioré's Blemish Fighting Ice Cleanser + Triple Action Astringent). The signified could be any number of things: clean, healthy, complexion clearing, powerful, quick. By combining the signifier and the signified, we arrive at the sign: clean, complexion clearing, quick, and powerful Blemish Fighting Ice Cleaner and Triple Action Astringent by Bioré. While some of this information is given in the copy of the ad, some parts of the signified come from a general knowledge of what cleanser and astringent are used for. The colors used in the advertisement - Bioré's signature green, on a pink background with a bold/pastel top border, characterize a kind of young, fresh-faced look most often seen in older teenagers and younger adults.
Personally, I enjoy that there are no people in the advertisement - in any visual media, people are overly-airbrushed and perfected on the computer which is an unfair declaration of what the user's skin will look like. The ad simply shows the two bottles, with their respective information (brand name, product name, uses, main ingredient) tied together with a ribbon which has “complexion clearing” written on it. Additionally, there is text in a bracket pointing to the bottles claiming “7 out of 10 women saw healthy skin in less than 2 weeks when using this combo.” The largest text of the advertisement is that mentioned above (“up for a 2 week challenge? You bet your pretty face”), but more is written underneath. More information is given about the product in a smaller font under the headline - “clinically proven to remove over 95% of dirt and oil” stands out the most, along with the company's website. As a final point, in the very bottom left-hand corner of the advertisement, Bioré repeats their name along with the tagline “Beauty starts here.”
