AdvertisingSpring: Skinterest Spoof Ad Final

Skinterest

My name is Francie and my design is entitled Skinterest, a spoof ad on the social media site Pinterest. I used Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to create the Skinterest logos and took the included photos with the help of a friend and her digital camera.

The intended media for the ads would be mainly online, as well as a mobile app for one’s phone, but also with the exception of one print placement in a magazine. Pinterest as it is now, has created a reputation for having a very feminine appeal as a social media site, and therefore, mainly used by females (83% of global users are women, according to Wikipedia.com). The subject of my ad is a commentary on both pornography, in the most basic “naked” sense, and the way our generation uses the popular social media sites of our generation; e.g. Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and of course Pinterest, to name a few. My theory is that if both women and men in fact popularized Pinterest, it would turn into one of a social media platform, one of many, in which both sexes would be more inclined to compete with each other by over-sexualizing and objectifying themselves in order to answer to society’s “standard beauty”. I spoofed the essence of Pinterest and its proponents by making a new logo and fake profile of a male user. The message lies in the pictures and captions, which are unnecessarily provocative for the categories that they represent, or that “John Smith” “skinned”(not pinned); e.g. Health and Fitness, Sports, Film, Music & Books, Hair & Beauty, and Food. In addition, Skinterest’s provocative new name and logo both coordinate with “John Smith’s” profile to unify the fetishized motif of the site. Style wise, the new logo is leaning more towards deconstructive than geometric in that it does not have any aligned, repetitive, gridlike pattern, but is more of a commentary created from the break down, analysis, and reworking of Pinterest’s originals components.

This work is relevant to my life because I am a user of social media, and I see the ways in which it is abused, in my opinion, every day. I think people are way too competitive in regards to their virtual persona’s and they take social media too seriously. I don’t underestimate the power social media has as a forum to bring people together but with this project, I would definitely like to open up a dialogue with the people who also are exposed to delusional Facebookers or Tweeters on the regular. I find the juxtaposition between mocking social media at the same time that I continue to be an avid user so fascinating. Is the joke on me? As I scroll through others work for this class, it is a relief to see that my peers and I both understand how to differentiate between the bullshit and truths of this world. I’m not saying that the designers of Pinterest created dishonesty by their website, I’m only commentating on what the site might have become with a different target audience. The typography and logos for Pinterest are not typefaces, but rather originally designed, and not to mention perfectly crafted. The idea behind a photo-sharing website that allows people to make their own collection of images is also genius, in fact, I found myself loving the site as I made my fake profile and understanding why people create honest hobbies from it, and even considering making my own.

I would say that my intended audience is teenagers, college students, and that generation that’s out of college, in between my generation’s age and my parents’. I want Skinterest’s audience to laugh and be thoroughly humored at my fetishizing a beloved, relatively new social media site. My purpose is to facilitate amusement while at the same time, provoke serious thought about how social media sites who have a much broader audience can corrupt our society to much, especially those younger minds. Overall, I’m really pleased with the outcome of my Skinterest campaign. I think one of the strengths about my spoof ad campaign is the new logo I’ve created, while a weakness may be the lack in range of pictures I’ve uploaded to my imaginary user’s Pinterest account. If I had the opportunity to rewind time and take a few more pictures, maybe some goofier yet still tasteful ones, I would.