advertising

What could say "back in New Jersey" more eloquently than the Stop & Shop carpark?   But this image isn't meant to be an image of consumerist despair so much as Item One in a week when we're discussing advertisement photography.   I anticipate - but I don't know - that we'll have much to say tomorrow about magazine ads, and seductive/false promises within them (they are, after all, the easiest genre to bring to class, although I fantasize about someone unfurling a huge billboard poster).   Or wheeling in a shopping cart, although they'd have to pay a dollar to unleash these ones from S&S.

For one thing that our reading doesn't really take on board is the humdrum image, placed somewhere that's never going to be eyecatching, but that, I suppose, might slowly sink into one's subliminal consciousness as one stands in one of S&S's preternaturally slow check out lines.   Rather than encouraging some future-oriented feel good fantasy, this is aimed at stirring up a combination of anxiety ("What is Your Home Worth Today?" - I think you'll have to click on the picture to make it larger in order to read that) - with the promise that the reassuring-looking Tami couple "Your Realtors for life" will somehow look after one.   How, exactly, is not explained... they'll tell you that it's worth more than you hoped?   And then?   I don't know whether it's a fortuitous accident that their family name also is the acronym for Tax Advantage Mortgage Insurance, but one would have to be puzzling over the ad for a very long while in that line in order to work that one out.

It may also be an accident that the shopping carts (I keep typing "shopping trolleys," in a blithe British fashion) are Rutgers red, but a salute to the Scarlet Women on reaching the NCAA Sweet Sixteen!