Advertising : Advertising And The Use Of Advertising

Every piece of writing is embellished with its own set of rhetorical techniques meant to influence an audience to agreeing with a certain idea or purpose. In order to persuade and attract the audience, writers tend towards including techniques that invoke pathos or logos. For instance, Tony Robbins uses rhetorical techniques to engage his audience, explaining through active language and rhetorical questions how emotion is the motivating factor for any human action. As such, Robbins asserts that “emotion creates what we are going to do, or the action”. His message is that emotion is the most powerful device that leads people to do what they are doing.

Magazines are popular in the United States; they can be found in stores, offices, and houses. They are popular for advertising. Television, news, radio, billboards and online websites are just a few forms of media that companies use to advertise their products or services. Companies use advertisements to influence the consumer to either buy or use their products and services. Advertisements are used to manipulate consumers in many ways.

Thus, by creating appeals to logos, pathos, and ethos, companies use advertisements as powerful persuasive tools. This can be done through the careful selection of color, imagery, narration, design, and layout, to name a few significant elements. When used correctly, these rhetorical strategies can make the difference between whether a product or idea is embraced or rejected by the

Semiotics is a critical approach that studies the symbols as elements of communicative behaviour (Dictionary.com). One would analyze the image influence, language influence, and the intention of the advertisement. Image influence includes colours, pictures, and the action (if necessary). Language influence contains the text size, type of font, and phrases. The intention of the ad includes the purpose and the intended audience (age, gender, culture (etc.)). I will be focusing on the utilization of semiotics through a “Herbal Essences” advertisement. The ad motivates its customers by its image, language, and purpose.

What captures the attention of people when they view an advertisement, commercial or poster? Is it the colors, a captivating phrase or the people pictured? While these are some of the elements often employed in advertising, we can look deeper and analyze the types of appeals that are utilized to draw attention to certain advertisements. The persuasive methods used can be classified into three modes. These modes are pathos, logos, and ethos. Pathos makes an appeal to emotions, logos appeals to logic or reason and ethos makes an appeal of character or credibility. Each appeal can give support to the message that is being promoted.

People see thousands of ads each year. It may seem like the company who designed and create this ad just put whatever looked best and would draw the viewer's attention but the use of word and images on ads go much deeper. For example this ad was found while shopping for shoes online. This ad shows a persons holding a cigarette, this persons hand is shaped as a gun but what the ad wants to readers attention to go to would be not the hand in the front but the shadow in the back, the shadow is a hand but instead of holding a cigarette, the hand is holding a gun. This shadow is meant to represent the reality of what a cigarette can do for a person's health.

Today’s quick-moving world of technology has media texts such as advertisements to make sure that people understand with just a glance. Having adverts on magazines, social media and billboards allow them to use tools such as semiology, genre and narrative because it makes their messages clear instantly. These signs allow us to carry meaning through advertisements, connotations and the signification process. These tools let brands, mainly celebrities, and the option to produce and create a myth of the product such as “Be daring. Be an inspiration” to sell it to the world. We are in a time where advertisers use ‘simplicity’ in their adverts; there are no more paragraphs. It is mainly down to the person and the few words shown in that advert.

Examining and analysing semiotics in images and visual texts contributes to a greater understanding of the production of myths and ideologies in representations, most notably in advertisements (Strokes, 2012, p. 124). Through assessing the semiotic elements present in the print advertisement for Dallas Farmers Market (Appendix 1), and the corresponding mythology, it will be determined that the ad is successful in connecting with the company’s target market, creating a memorable impression, and influencing people to shop at the Dallas Farmers Market.

In this thesis Mullen and Fisher’s (2004) elaboration of Foss’ ideas serves as both a theoretical framework for understanding the way visual images act as rhetoric and as a method for analyzing the visual rhetoric of advertising imagery. This thesis adopts Mullen and Fisher’s (2004) elaboration of Foss’ techniques and expands upon the method using Lambiase and Reichert (2003).

Advertising has become one of the most powerful and effective tools that business uses to launch and brand products. Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Everyday we are surrounded by advertisements, influencing us to make different purchases without our mind even realizing how much they really affect us. Advertising is available in many different mediums and communicated across many different forums. Of all of the forms of advertising, visual advertising has proven to be one of the most successful. Graphic designers have the ability to put subtle references and innuendos into your mind by utilizing different fonts, colors, and visual points

In his essay The Rhetoric of The Image, Roland Barthes explores the relationship between image and meaning. He centres his discussion around the advertisement as advertising is a medium in which there is an intended message being sent to the viewer. Barthes puts forward that if an image contains signs, in advertising the signs are ‘full’, as these signs are formed with the viewer in mind so that the intended message is not missed.

The theory of semiotics, as proposed by Roland Barthes, has been used to analyze advertisements and the effectiveness of advertisements on viewers. In the articles that I researched that used semiotics to analyze particular advertisements, I found four common and related themes. First, the articles mentioned that the viewer determines the meaning of the advertisement or the viewer interprets the advertisement. Second, this meaning that the viewer assigns to the advertisement is largely determined by context, both social and cultural. Third, advertisers use culture and predominant cultural beliefs in their advertisements in efforts to reach their audience more effectively. Finally, these advertisements actually end up supporting the

Advertisements work in such a way that we grow to envy those we are not; they exploit our perceived flaws by displaying a person who is the living and breathing version of who we wish to be. John Berger in his book, Ways of Seeing, explains that publicity works by convincing his reader that advertisements use envy to entice the public to buy products: “Publicity persuades us...by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable” (131). Though Berger published his book in 1972, his arguments about envy and publicity still hold truth, perhaps now more than ever. Furthermore, the more present advertisements are in our everyday life, the more envious our society becomes. With the power of envy, those who fall under its spell become choiceless, and therefore powerless. Berger also argues in his book that there is a correlation between the number of advertisements we see and the less freedom Americans possess. However, Berger believes that capitalism hides this powerlessness with the illusion of choice: “Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society” (149). This idea Berger has relates not only to the advertisement of products, but also to present-day politics. Withheld information creates power using envy which is used in both advertisements and the US government. As more envy is created with modern day technology, and we become more immersed into social media, the further we stray from democracy.

In semiotic interpretation, I will explain how advertisement targets audience through sounds, images and words through the mass medium? In the 1950’s advertisers were male dominants the industry who strategize ideas to seek new female’s consumers into buying their products? The adverts ideology that all females wants to be free and live a life of comfort and beauty. In 1950 about one in three women participated in the work labor force (BLS). The commercial image above as a first-time watcher, the commercial is centering around the word “luxury”. For example, luxury means the state of great comfort and extravagant living is denotative. What luxury means connotative in an urban culture, a famous person lifestyle is of glamour and wealth that have access to material things most average working American can’t afford so easily. The advert approach was clever grabbing the attention of women creating prosperity theme. The American culture mindset were seeking peace and prosperity in their livelihood. To compare the 1950’s verse 2017’s on how advert gets the woman consumer attention pretty much the same way shaping the minds through medium still by selling fantasy, fairy tale and social construct beauty to buy things because it can help enhance our life.

Advertising is a persuasive communication attempt to change or reinforce one’s prior attitude that is predictable of future behavior. We are not born with the attitudes for which we hold toward various things in our environment. Instead, we learn our feelings of favorability or unfavorability through information about the object through advertising or direct experience with the object, or some combination of the two. Furthermore, the main aim of advertising is to ‘persuade’ to consumer in order to generate new markets for production.