Look at this sequence of scenes that we have frozen and isolated out of the ad. Considerable effort has gone into staging the sequence of framed pictures behind the young man. Each image is virtually identical, with the exception that in each frame the figure is moved closer to the edge of the frame until it begins to exit the frame on the right side of the screen. On closer examination, we see that the figure is standing on a skate board and that the figure is the same person that we have beebn following in the background.

Now, we recognize that relatively few viewers are attentive enough to notice this little visual joke in the flow of the commercial. This is hardly the most important visual image in the ad; it is merely one among many signifiers that dot the backgrounds behind the portraits that are being drawn of generation d.

Still, we are firm believers that the backgrounds can tell us a good deal about who we really are culturally, at least who we really are through the lens of an ad agency. So, why go to such lengths to create this carefully arranged foreground/background juxtaposition?

Let's speculate. Specualation one - it is a way of hailing the viewer as someone who is visually literate and has a visual sense of humor. Speculation two - it is a more self-reflective joke about the mechanical reproduction of images in a society of the spectacle. Is this a way of defining generation d folks - that they not only are unafraid of computer technology, cool and laid back, they also have a keen sense, accumulated from a lifetime of watching tv, of critical distance with regard to media representations? What could it be that the producers of this ad thought they were communicating by so artfully constructing this frame? A clue into the identity and aesthetic sensibility of the generation d guy we have been following.