Blog #2 - Frith methodology

The surface meaning of the ad: The ad starts off with a man traveling the desert looking thristy and being sweaty. He sees a giant coke bottle in the distance and suddenly many different types of people from show girls to men on motorcycles racing towards the bottle. The man looks back to see that he actually had a coke bottle with him in an ice cooler the whole time and now he has the last laugh. It is revealed that the giant coke bottle is a sign pointing towards the nearest coke location which is 50 miles away. The racers are still racing towards this regardless of the distance.

The advertiser's intended meaning of the ad: They wanted to replicate the sense of being thirsty to the viewer. The man in the ad is sweaty and is obviously thirsty. A common trope in any media depicting desert travel is that the one doing the traveling is always on the search for something to drink. Once the viewer sees that coke bottle they themselves are going to want to have a drink from it because they are imagining themselves in  a desert without anything to drink. Once they see many people racing to obtain that coke they know that it is a valuable drink and many people would go to extreme lengths to obtain it.

The cultural or idealogical meaning of the ad: culturally coke is seen as a pivotal beverage. If someone goes out in public they are most likely guaranteed to see at least one person drinking a coke. The ad depicts people racing to obtain that coke like they have to have it. It's a summer soda. The ad demonstrates this by using the desert as its' setting. When people are thirsty in the summer or when it is hot outside they should be drinking a coke to quench their thirst.