Friend Request Accepted!

Only a few short months ago, I was innocently riding the 6-train minding my own business, and the ad plastered from wall to wall, floor to ceiling, miraculously caught my eye. It featured the new campaign for Dentyne Ice gum and each ad displayed a caption that would normally be seen in relation to some form of mediated communication slang, something we may recognize from our use of the internet. However, in this context, the caption was paired with an image that had absolutely nothing to do with the internet, but rather, it was an intimate, personal moment shared between two people. If my description of the ad doesn’t quite convey the meaning, I’ll give an example: one of the posters featured a man and women smiling at each other in a seductive way, their faces so close they were nearly touching, and alongside the bottom of the poster the caption read “Friend Request Accepted.” Dentyne Ice was attempting to send a message to its audience that suggests that our time invested in mediated interactions with one another is not as valuable as our time spent physically around the people we interact with. The main slogan of their campaign is “Make Face Time.” This is a genius form of advertisement. They are implying that people need to be physically close to one another to build true relationships, but during that sacred time together, you better not forget to smell minty fresh!!

This ties into our focus in class on Barthes’ model of semiotics. In fact, it runs parallel to the Trojan ad using the pigs to signify men, and therefore, implying that men and women should be protecting themselves during sex with the use of a condom. Dentyne Ice is using the image of two people intimately close to one another to convey the importance and pleasure in human interaction, but it puts it in terms of modern day interaction, the most obvious form being the use of the internet. Using the internet lingo to connect people physically is a great way to tie the two concepts together, but it’s also a witty incorporation of a new facet of our culture.
The best part of this whole campain is the Dentyne Ice website -- www.dentyne.com. They give you a time limit of 3 minutes to surf their site and then they automatically kick you off…why, you ask? Because their extending the message that you should be spending your time doing more important things, like cozying up with the apple of your eye… ;-)