ToW #18 - Advertisement for FirstBank: "Find the sousaphone"

        A straightforward and colorful picture, this advertisement, created by TDA Advertising & Design, is part of a series of magazine ads that involve extremely easy item hunts. The concept is simple: the instructions ask you to locate a prominent item in the drawing and then reward you with a reason to get a FirstBank account. With such a simple premise, many visual choices must have been made in order to fully convince the viewer to buy into FirstBank. The eye-catching but not garish coloring is one, the familiar layout another, and the concise wording is the last. All of these decisions come together to urge any and all members of the check-laden adult audience to ally with FirstBank.

        All of the colors that we can see in this drawing are all from a nice, dusty, and soft palette. Even the black background is more of a gray. The two main colors are yellow and green; real eye-grabbers in an otherwise black and white magazine. There's also a huge variety of color: reds, pinks, blues, purples, browns, oranges, and more. The cartoon-like drawing gives an overall happy and calm sensation to any viewer, including adults who may be so stressed over their finances that any welcoming picture will get them to sign up for a new bank account. Pleasant colors give the company name of FirstBank a pleasant connotation to all possible clients.

        Then, we should consider the layout of the ad. It's clearly reminiscent of I SPY books that everyone played with when they were kids -- there are instructions to find something and a visually complex image to search through. The mosts subtle callback, though, is the placement of the clue on a bottom bar under the picture. This plays on the muscle-memory of the audience, asking viewers to first look at the drawing, then the clue in the lower left, and then search the rest of the bottom bar for more clues before stumbling upon the logo and slogan: "Free checking for all. FirstBank". This strategy makes the ad feel even more natural to look at. Viewers who grew up with image search games see it as almost an old friend. Yet again, this nostalgia gets associated with FirstBank, giving it a more positive image and further convincing viewers to become clients.