Deconstruction of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R and AMD Joint Promotion/Ad

The other day, my friend Wei gave me this flyer/ad/promotion. This ad came with his graphics card he had purchased and was part of a promotional drive by the company that published the game as well as the video card processor manufacturer AMD. On this ad you can see the ATI Radeon and AMD logo as well as the game title in a larger font to attract attention to it. Although AMD's ATI Radeon series GPU's aren't as renowned in the GPU market as Nvidia's GeForce GTX line, they still carry weight with them. In this ad, ATI Radeon is used as a reification for the game's promotion. The same can be said for the AMD logo seeing as it isn't as well known as its competitor in the CPU market, Intel. AMD is still used as a reification for the video game. This reification is not reciprocated back to AMD and ATI in that, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R video game series although not as successful as the Call of Duty series or Halo series video games, has still sold a substantial number of copies, still caries a bit of weight that can be beneficial to AMD.

 Along with the title and the logos, they put a great emphasis on the words expand, accelerate, dominate. These words are meant to be used as weasel words and are exceptionally vague. To begin with, the word expand doesn't exactly give you a clear meaning oh how that works. It leaves the question, "How does it expand your game?" It also leaves room to weasel away from assumption of the oblivious customer who expected it to be able increase their performance when playing a video game. The next word accelerate is less vague but doesn't specify how it would accelerate nor by how much. The naive buyer could rightfully assume that frame per second would go up by 10-20 when it might just improve it by 3-4. This word is also a weasel word because it leaves the room necessary for the company to say that the definition was not understood and that they were not at fault. The final word dominate, is no better than the previous two in regards to its vagueness. The game play in which one would play could only benefit so much from the upgrade the graphics card processors manufactured by AMD would provide. Domination of the game is vague also due to the fact that the way in which one dominates a game could be unclear. Is dominating the game getting 8 kills and 0 deaths, or is it getting 100 kills and 0 deaths. Perhaps it is getting a flawless victory in an MMO or beating the campaign of a a game in record time. But it could also yield very little or absolutely zero improvement to your game play. The word is also a weasel word in that it doesn't specifically state that you will win 100% of the time, no it implies it and leaves the rest to your imagination.

Besides the uses of language on the ad, there is also a very eye catching graphic to go with it. This graphic depicts a man standing or marching with a sniper rifle. This caught my eye especially due to the heavy use of FPS (first person shooter) style game advertisements championed by the Call of Duty series and Halo. These kinds of things catch my eye due to the fact that the games are so popular and are in almost any store that sells a video game. 

Overall, the advertisement/promotion is neither effective nor is it ineffective. I say this because I view it more as a neutral ad. Although there is prominent things on the add that attract attention, it is nothing special or new. In fact I saw it as the generic general ad that can attract attention, just not the amount to make amazing but not small enough that it could be classified as ineffective.