The World Wildlife Fund is always coming up with interesting and powerful advertisements, and this is just one of the many. The entire advertisement is an image of an open, green, perfect-for-golfing field and a golfer in his finishing motion. Everything seems normal at a glance, but a closer look shows that the golfer is not swinging a golf club but an axe.
At once I understood what this meant. Golf courses require flat surfaces, and for that reason many trees are chopped down for a single course. The purpose of the advertisement is very specific though. The WWF is not trying to say that golf is a habitat-destroying sport and should be totally banned. On the bottom of the advertisement it says, "Building a single golf course puts thousands of trees at stake. However in Southern Turkey, they are planning to build several courses simultaneously. Take action. Help us stop them." The WWF's true purpose is to persuade the general public to help them stop the simultaneous building of golf courses in Southern Turkey, which they achieve effectively
With the trademark logo of the panda in the bottom left hand corner, the image establishes an automatic ethos without much explaining. The audience knows that the panda symbolizes the WWF and that the advertisement is going to have to do with the environment. People will take the advertisement seriously through that credibility, and the WWF will be able to deliver its message more powerfully.
The WWF also uses a very effective metaphor by saying in font slightly bigger than it's message, "The par: 200,000 trees." In golf, the par signifies the number of strokes an expert golfer is expected to take on an entire course. How many is the par on this hole? A whole 200,000 trees. The WWF is comparing the standard of the golf course to the number of trees that the golf course took down. Through this, the WWF can indirectly lay out its logos and connect the whole thing back to golf.
This advertisement has quite a bit of irony as well. To many people, myself included, golf is a sport where one can become a part of nature. The golf course is a sacred seclusion within a chaotic society that seems untouched by human hands. As a golfer myself, I love the natural part about golf; ironically, a golf course is created artificially and requires the destruction of true nature. This irony makes the message even more powerful and can bring people to the WWF's purpose to bring a stop to the simultaneously building of golf courses in Southern Turkey.
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