Shelter Advert

Analysis

Context

• Shelter is a UK based housing and homelessness charity (less money to spend on advertising and marketing than commercial campaigns, hence more print based)
• Campaign targeted liberal reformers and carers (Young and Rubican personality types), family orientated
• Main focus of campaign - to direct potential charity users to seek advice and help (link with Big Issue strapline - a 'hand up, not a handout')
• Maintaining limited production values, campaign focus was poster ads plus Facebook and mobile messaging (only 6 weeks)
• Hopes for 'audience identification' with ordinary people in distress - a key selling point of many charity campaigns in this elements of social realism
• Dual target audience - those experiencing problems and people who can help via donation
• Socio/political context - effects were still being felt from the 2008 UK banking crisis (economy shrank considerably at 2010 end leading to austerity for more people than previous years). May 2010 saw a new Conservative government
• Shelter hoped the poster campaign would take clients to online advice pages via shelter website to prevent losing their home
• Creative communication ad agency Amplify sequenced campaign - specialse in non traditional media approaches (foregrounding the importance of posters as traditional media into online platforms)
• Pro bono campaign (technically free, Amplify offered services on a voluntary basis, hence campaign cannot be too elaborate). Other clients are high profile, blue chip
• Three poster campaign - all using extreme close up

Language and Representation

• Uses genre conventions of social realism - identifiable and recognisable representations
• Red, upper cases, sans serif bold text has connotations of urgency and immediacy
• The poster is in the form of a triptych - 3 panels connotations of seriousness (many historical triptych representations are epic, religious allegories)
• Gender diversity (homelessness can happen to anyone) - close ups anchor themed and issues with serious facial expressions

Each panel represents a different issue:

• Panel 1 uses a rhetorical question to position the audience into understanding the potential consequences of losing your job but more importantly, is preventative charity advertising
• Contacting Shelter could prevent a negative consequence. "Where will we live?" has connotations of her role as main wage earner.
• Panel 2 focuses on a young man's problem with his landlord - like panel 1 this represents austerity and a lack of affordable housing (potentially a political representation)
• Panel 3 focuses on a younger woman's problem with debt - all the panels challenge the stereotype that older men are more likely to be homeless
• Solution based advertising offers the simplistic technique or directing the client to Housing Advice via a website
• All three close ups have connotations of mug shots with their simplistic colour palette - dramatic red with black (bleak) background