CK's Beautiful Fantasy

This advertisement, which is a relatively obvious parody of Calvin Klein’s perfume and cologne lines, poses a hysterically great mockery of what scent sales are all about. Technically, it seems like there’s nothing much that a picture can do to promote a perfume or cologne besides give it a persona that will appeal to the largest number of potential buyers. Calvin Klein tends to take the approach of portraying beautiful, thin, sculpted, and pretty much perfectly elegant and classy models as the face of their cologne-promotion campaigns. In the Adbusters version of it, there is a relatively overweight man, hairy chest, no visible muscles, your average joe so to speak. It portrays the complete opposite of everything that Calvin Klein ever advertises, everything that is- as mentioned in the heading- REALITY. The reality of the matter is, men are not all sculpted to perfection, hairless, silky smooth with an all year round gorgeously sun-kissed looking tan. The people that are that way are either extremely blessed, or work their tails off to get there (meaning no life, and never eating). People are real, people have flaws, normal people are not perfect. This is something that I believe advertisers try to hide from people, like it’s one big secret, while still oddly enough managing to shove it in everyone’s face at the same time. I personally hate the advertising business because I think it’s one of the most manipulative, evil, conniving professions out there, it’s all one big trick to manipulate people into thinking they want a certain product, whilst trying to jedi mind trick them into believing this all new standard for beauty and normalcy. This advertisement does a great job of hitting that right at the core and shattering the perfect picture that has been upheld for so long, only to unveil what we all need to see, and that is, the REALITY.