"Impossible is Nothing"

http://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2008/05/27/14-creative-advertisements/

(You'll have to scroll down to the picture of the swimmer with gills for Adidas...it's the 8th picture on the site.)

When trying to read this picture of a woman swimmer with gills on her neck, which is an advertisement for Adidas, we see that the use of signifiers clearly is getting the message across to the readers. This advertisement is historical in the sense that humans have,in the past, thought about what it would be like to have gills and swim underwater. The movie, 'Water World' depicts this well as a man has gills and is able to swim with ease underwater for hours at a time without having to worry about oxygen, which may have enforced the inspiration for this ad. Adidas, with the cleaver use of a camera angle as a signifier, gets a downward angle from over the girl's shoulder, getting a side image of her neck, which then draws the reader's eyes to the gills (gills make the normal become abnormal and draws the reader to analyze the ad). Our cultural convention has always been that humans do NOT have gills...this ad shows the abnormality of this thought).

Another signifier, the dark lighting, makes the reader think of the darkness of being DEEP underwater, and thus with Adidas gear, we would feel that we actually could swim down deeper than ever was humanly possible (you feel like you have actually have gills). Adidas is trying to prove that the use of their gear and equipment that the "impossible is nothing" and that with their swim gear, you will feel like a fish with gills as you swim through the water with ease (the ad makes our position to be that Adidas gear is better than all other brands...aka this piece of culture is political as it advances Adidas and suppresses other brands). In the way that it makes you feel, the ad is rhetorical as it argues that you NEED adidas gear to swim well and that the impossible is actually obtainable.