No More Tears

In todays society people are assaulted by ads every day. The ads are everywhere, in your house, in your car, on the streets. Slogans, catchy songs, videos and images are flashed across TV screens, websites, billboards, phones and radios around the world. These ads are produced by a handful of big name companies. The ads not only try to sell you tangible products but also ideas of what things and people should be or act. Over the years these ads have grown more controversial and suggestive. The teen pregnancy ads in particular have become more aggressive than in the past years with the increase rate of teen pregnancy. The New York City Human Resources Administration with their Teen pregnancy prevention campaign for example is causing a lot of controversy.

To begin with one of the campaign posters is extremely eye catching. The ad shows a picture of a crying toddler. The toddler’s picture is cropped in to where only his shoulders and face are showing on top of a plain bluish gray background. The toddler is wearing a red and grey-stripped shirt, has short caramel colored curls and big sad green eyes. The child is shown with a heart wrenching crying face as two big crocodile tears slowly slide down his cheeks. The toddler’s picture takes up the most of the left side of the page. On the right side of the page are the words “I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen” written in black ink with large child like hand writing. A strip of yellow is pasted across the bottom of the page and sits at an angle. On the yellow strip are the words “Kids of teen moms are twice as likely not to graduate than kids whose moms were over the age 22.” The sentence is written in all capital letters with a bold font and...

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...nancies and the information about the company are written in smaller found compared to everything else on the page and placed in the bottom right hand corner because the are less important. At the first glance the companies point is made by the picture and the larger text, if the script in the corner was made larger than it would not be as quick and easy to figure out what the ad was about. The corner script is basically for people who will take more than a few seconds to stare at the ad, and the last pink sentence was the companies last attempted to hold the attention of the viewer to their ad.

In any cause the author of the ad is specifically targeting teens with these kinds of campaign ads. The ad is meant to question teens about whether they want to become a teen mom. This ad would most likely appear on the walls of New York City and in popular teen magazines.