Lisa Hom

Corona Light

This ad was taken from Men’s Health magazine. It is targeted at men who are interested in healthy lifestyles, fashion, and ways to appeal to women. The comparison of the pale, dark, sickly-looking "punk" next to a healthy, tanned, relaxed looking "dude" demonstrates antithesis and apposition, the contrasting of ideas in a equally balanced ad. The assumption from looking at the ad would be that if you drank the regular light beer you would be hanging out in alleys, hiding from the sun and subjecting your body to unhealthy piercings. Apophasis is not directly saying that regular light beer is a bad thing, but the comparison to the healthy smiling results of drinking Corona Light implies that Corona is better for you.

The cliché of a punk with multiple piercings and darkened eyes and lips plays on the target audience’s goal of finding ways to make themselves look good. The cliché of the healthy lifestyle of relaxed beach life appeals to the pathos and also the logos. It appeals to the ethos because of the stereotype of the bad boy image of the punk breaking with tradition and society compared to the clean-cut, muscular beach boy.

The choice of typeface printed on an adhesive bandage for the boring regular light beer is contrasted to the Corona name branded into a plank of wood. The fine print of the ad “Miles away from other light beers” is flush right to the bottle labeled Light to draw the eye to the bottle and reemphasize the perceived benefits of light beer and reinforce the word “light.” An example of aporia, this fine print clarifies the meaning of the pictures – if you drink this beer you will be transported to the Tropics. The soothing blues of the ocean and sky, the pristine white sands on the beach and warm yellow glow from the Corona Light is far away from the dark, graffiti-filled alley of the boring plain light beer in a can. In fact, the use of a bandage could even mean that drinking regular light beer could hurt you.

The ad only has three areas of text, none in very large print and all are located at the bottom of the page. As an example of epiphone, of the eighteen words clearly legible in this ad, five of them are the word “light.”

The ad is an analogy: if you drink Corona Light you will be in the light (sunshine). It is also distinctio, providing various meanings to the word “light” as in less calorie beer, sunlight, and translucency of the bottle versus the opaqueness of the can. The connotation of light beer being a healthier alternative to regular beer is further defined as Corona Light being even healthier than just regular light.

English 5730 is taught by Dr. Richard Nordquist.
Armstrong Atlantic State University
Savannah, Georgia 31419
912/921 5991

15 February 2006