semiotics of ads

SEMIOTICS AND ADVERTISING

Advertisements are everywhere. Ads affect or relate to almost every aspect of our lives. We all know about the message of ads: this product makes you look cool, sexy, younger, older, more attractive, richer. It goes on. Do we listen, are we fooled? Most people think other people are persuaded by ads yet they are immune. Yet studies following up on ad campaigns find that people literally perceive ads as targeted to them in terms of age, gender and interests and tune into those ads and not ones they perceive as targeted to a different group. So presumably there is a sensitivity to messages we believe are for us. And we understand and presumably respond positively to these messages. A question is why? Why is it so? Why does someone telling us that a particular drink will give us more life and happiness mean everyone buys that drink? A number of understandings have come from the field of semiotics.

Once ads were mostly reliant on the written text, with the words explaining or complementing the visual; a person speaking a message that is emphasized by the pictures. This has changed radically. Contemporary advertising can be a mini drama, a continuing story or a montage of images. The growing use of visuals in ads has enhanced the ambiguity of meaning embedded in the message structure. The function of the text has moved away from explaining the visual and toward a more cryptic or coded form where the text is a key to the visual.

The aim is to make the ad more ambiguous and thereby enhancing its effectiveness by linking the product to a broad and subtle range of associations. Decoding what is happening in these complicated message structures requires the use of a method such as semiotics. Semiotics is a method for examining textual material. A text in this context is anything we can read or understand as having meaning: images, sounds, words. In semiotics, the science of signs, we derive meaning from reading and interpreting signs in combinations. The French theorist Roland Barthes was one of the first to study advertising from this perspective. A precursor was the literary and media critic Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan anticipated what has become a major area of interest in advertising from the perspective of its relationship with media systems and popular culture.

The semiotic analysis of advertising assumes that the meanings are designed by their creators to shape and lend significance to our reality. We are encouraged to see ourselves, the products and the services advertised and aspects of our social world in terms of the mythic meanings that the ads promote. Myths and narratives play an important role in generating and maintaining social beliefs and identity. For example Barthes analysed a front cover of the magazine Paris-Match in terms of the ways in which the signs and codes were used to represent French colonial rule as natural and self-evident. The photograph worked to support the ideological position that colonialism was normal, natural and uncontroversial by showing a black man in a French uniform saluting the French flag. The semiotic analysis of signs and codes within advertisements reveals the mythic structures of meanings that the ads work to communicate. It has also been argued that ads not only draw on structures of meaning but also create structures of meaning themselves. These meanings then contribute to our ways of seeing ourselves and the world.

Many contemporary ads do not directly ask us to buy a product. Often they seem to be more concerned with amusing us, presenting us with a puzzle or demonstrating their own sophistication. The aim of this development in advertising is to engage us in their structure of meaning, to encourage us to participate by decoding their linguistic and visual signs, codes and social myths, and to enjoy this decoding activity. At the same time as we are decoding the signs we are participating in the structures of meaning that the ads represent.

In order to study ads closely in semiotic terms we need to separate ads from their environment. We need to identify the visual and linguistic signs in the ad, to see how the signs are organised paradigmatically and note how the signs relate to each other through various coding systems. We need to identify which social myths the ad draws on and whether or not the myths are reinforced or challenged. We also need to recognise that all codes are potentially ambiguous and that different readers have the potential to decode the signs differently. We can assume that anything that carries meaning to us in an ad is a sign. So linguistic signs (words) and iconic signs (visual representations) all act as signs adding to the cumulative code and meaning. These signs can simply denote something, an object or people that they represent, or they can carry connotations, meanings that have social and cultural relevance. Some of these we recognise consciously, others unconsciously. A model in an ad can denote the particular individual or a young woman in a given situation but can also carry the connotation of the mythic ideal of feminine beauty. The ad presents us with a sign, a young woman and this sign signifies a concept or a range of concepts. The ad works because the signs are easily readable. What is denoted has meaning in as far as it leads the reader to comprehend the mythic connotations, the overall message about the meaning of the product.