London Advertisement Analysis

This 2016 print advertisement from the London based financial information company taps into the need of people for leisure and calls them to thoughtful action about investments through pathos, logos and irony. The at first glance simple arrangement of a sentence fragment and clock parts creates a competition between money and time to entice adult readers new to the investment world to use the company for financial advice; cultured and expected responses are used in a negative light to engender trust and curiosity about the service. Why did this company invoke a competition between money and time to lure its audience? The ad speaks to resilient cultural constructions, keenly known to new adults, of a good life as consisting of two discrete and paradoxical categories, at once opposed and unified; the money made and time spent making it; and of all relations between the two as an inherent psychological battle for dominance in the observer’s brain. The ad employs a visually competitive framework when not folded out to indirectly prime the reader’s mind to address these underlying tensions. The stern message of ‘Remember. Money is everything in life,” is contrasted with a collection of clock parts …show more content…
The text is large, white, and prominently placed against both dark backgrounds and the previous sentence. There is a clear sequence to the words, a slow babbling along to a message reversal and capitalization on that reversal. It posits a simple answer to the swirling emotions and questions in the reader’s head after the first page: prioritize time. The inner dialogue of the two halves is set off by itself spatially in an attempt to empathize with the instincts that London Stock Exchange Group wishes to instill in viewers – a drive that will entice them to let the Group handle their investments. The initial firing up of viewers is cooled and the resulting flow put towards selling the