Semiotic Analysis In Advertising

The claim presented in the article is how ads often set unrealistic beauty standards, and how the author encourages them to “break free” from these standards by giving two examples on how ads should be compelled.

In our society today a business is not a business without an advertisement. These advertisements advertise what American’s want and desire in their lives. According to Jack Solomon in his essay, “Master’s of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising,” Jack Solomon claims: “Because ours is a highly diverse, pluralistic society, various advertisements may say different things depending on their intended audiences, but in every case they say something about America, about the status of our hopes, fears, desires, and beliefs”(Solomon). Advertisers continue to promote the American dream of what a women’s body should look like. They advertise their products in hopes for consumers to buy them, so they can look like the models pictures in the ads. Behind these ads, advertisers tend to picture flawless unrealistic woman with the help of Photoshop. In our society today to look like a model is an American dream and can be the reasons why we fantasizes and buy these products being advertised. “America’s consumer economy runs on desire, and advertising stokes the engines by transforming common objects;signs of all things that Americans covet most”(Solomon).

Jean Kilbourne’s film, Killing Us Softly 4, depicts the way the females are shown in advertisements. She discusses how advertisement sell concepts of normalcy and what it means to be a “male” and a “female.” One of her main arguments focuses on how women aspire to achieve the physical perfection that is portrayed in advertisements but this perfection is actually artificially created through Photoshop and other editing tools. Women in advertisements are often objectified as weak, skinny, and beautiful while men are often portrayed as bigger and stronger. Advertisements utilize the setting, the position of the people in the advertisements, and the products to appeal to the unconscious aspect

Magazine advertising share a common message theme: SEX SELLS. Advertising uses sexual content such as sexual or erotic images, and words or phases to attract the attention of the consumer who then notice the product. This form of advertising has been used for centuries dating back to the 1800s. The famous tobacco company W. Dukes & Sons Tobacco, used a strategy to sell tobacco in 1885, by inserting trading cards of sexually provocative actresses into their tobacco packages 3 ( see image #1 4). W. Dukes & Sons became the leading tobacco companies by 1890. How about this slogan “To make your skin flawless” from Woodbury’s Facial Soap company. The soap company was near its end in the early 1900s. To boost their sales, they changed their advertising. They had previously used images of a doctor’s face on their soap wrappers and advertising. Instead, they incorporated images of romantic couples showing attractive, young beautiful women along with slogans as “A Skin You Love to Touch” 5 to increase their sales. This strategy was very effective. The advertisement contained a couple; a young beautiful woman looking straight ahead and a handsome man looking at her. The male model is holding her right hand with his left arm is wrapped around her, holding her close to him. This gives the viewer the idea that the two models are a couple. The slogan in the

Throughout the years the representation of women in advertising has evolved. In the 1940’s and 1950’s adverts mainly focused on portraying females as the helper, mother, wife, social being, and sex object. There was an assumption that a woman’s main desire was to make her husband happy; that while she was the buyer, he was really the main consumer, as the wife cooked, cleaned and looked after the children, which ultimately benefitted him. Even though these ads were targeting female consumers, they were often-and still are- created using the ‘male gaze’ theory. British film theorist Laura Mulvey states that the majority of Western visual culture follows the male gaze, where the gaze is not referring to a specific ‘look’ in the image, but rather to the viewer who is assumed to be a male (Mulvey, 1999). Mulvey says that even women look with a

The United States require every driver to have car insurance in order to drive legally in the United States. The problem, however, is choosing the right one. Two of the major companies today are Allstate and State Farm. In the Allstate commercial, a man portrays “Mayhem” to show drivers the risks they experience while driving on the road. The man says he is modeling a blind spot, explaining that drivers may not see what hides in them, resulting in an accident. In the State Farm commercial, two situations are on display, one of which a teenage girl getting her first car, and the other a grown man getting his car broken into, demonstrating that State Farm is there for everyone. To endorse their product effectively, both of these brands apply pathos, ethos, and logos to their commercials.

Everyday people stare at billboards, magazine covers, movies, television, or pictures on the Internet of someone or something that they classify as beautiful. Some things people glance over and other things fascinate them. For example, when Farrah Fawcett’s famous picture of her in her red bathing suit came out; many teenage boys hung that picture in their bedrooms. Their idea of Farrah’s beauty was based strictly her outward appearance.

Moreover, as Richins (1991) reports, women always make social comparisons between the advertising models and themselves. As a result, advertising images create negative affect and increases women’s dissatisfaction with their own appearance. Since those images are edited through the consistent usage of digital technology, these idealized images do not portray women in a healthy manner. Indeed, these enhanced images would give these young girls the impression that they need to be ‘perfect’, just like these ‘fake’ images. According to Reist in ABC’s Gruen Session (2010), ‘young women get the message that they need to be thin, hot and sexy just to be acceptable’ in this society. Therefore, by generating the wrong perception of real beauty, the responsibility is pushed to the marketers, as they portray women with this stereotypical body type as acceptable. In addition, as the brand, Dove’s tagline in its advertisement - What happened to the ‘real beauty’? (Reist, 2010), marketers need not market their products in manners portraying women as airheads. Consequently, marketers gave most consumers viewing the advertisement, the wrong impression that

Visual Rhetorical Analysis Imagine posting a picture on instagram, a picture where you feel confident. A picture that you have thought about posting for awhile now but was not sure people would like it. A picture that you feel beautiful in. After posting it, you decide to take a break for a couple of hours and just leave the instagram picture up to gain tons of comments and a lot of likes. A couple hours past and you decide to check on the instagram picture.

An old saying that comes into play when just glancing at this advertisement, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” is an old saying pediatricians would say to their miniature patients. Who would know this could grab attention of people just watching TV? “An Apple a Day” illustrates four Granny Smith apples on one side of the ad while a slice of a Granny Smith apple sits on the other side of the ad. The product the advertiser is selling has more to offer than the other companies which, is shown by the whole apples and the slice of an apple. The small description underneath the Granny Smith apples has a formal, yet demanding tone that provides information about the product. In the fine print, it has some details on how their company is “one of the best. “Then below the small caption is a large, bold black logo followed by the contact information of the company all directed towards drivers. “An Apple a Day” is trying to connect with middle-class drivers looking for better quality insurance for an inexpensive price.

Advertisements play a huge role in the world today. They are all over the place. Whether they are on billboards, television, or in magazines, you cannot escape them. Advertising is a great way to persuade the viewers in many different ways. Many of these ads include the safety of driving and what not to do while being behind the wheel. For this particular ad, it focuses on keeping your eyes on the road. It shows a husband on the phone while looking at a map that the wife is showing him. What the husband doesn’t see in front of him is a child walking across the road, screaming as he sees the vehicle approaching him. This ad also shows that not only the child’s life in front is in danger, but the infant in the back seat is in danger as well. The creator of this ad uses different methods to get an individual to see the message that is shown in the advertisement. Three main uses that is shown in this advertisement are the use of color, wording, and the emotions.

Straight away when thinking of signs one would automatically think road signs, star signs or even pub signs however signs can also be drawings, paintings and photographs as well as words, sounds and body language. The study of signs and symbols is also known as semiotics. Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist and semiotic whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments; He is one of the founding fathers of semiotics which he called “semiology”. Semiology also looks into the use of signs and their interpretation. Semiotics are frequently used in advertising to signify an advertisers message through the use of signs and symbols for example it plays a significant role on catching the targets audiences eye by the placement of pictures, texts and logos. The use of semiotics is very important for a successful advert. Saussure offered a two-part model of a sign, he defined a sign being composed of two parts for example the signifier and the signified. According to Saussure the signifier was the representation, the word or the image, where as the signified was the meaning, the concept in which is associated with the signifier. This is why semiotics is so useful in advertisements because a sign straight away has a connotation behind it and can give away the message straight away to its audience for example the signifier is always going to be signified. In an advert if you see a packet of

Advertising, the business of drawing public attention to goods and services (elook.org), in today's competitive market, is often assisted by sex appeal. Likewise, an attribute of sex in advertising is that imagery used typically may have no connection to the product being advertised. However, the purpose of such imageries is to solely drag the attention of the potential customer or user. Sex appeal in advertising is often considered as one of the effective tools for attracting consumers' attention and has become more and more important to some advertisers for the same reason.

The photo is an Axe shower gel advertisement. There is a man and a woman on opposite sides of the picture shown from the waist up. The guy is on the left, he is paler complected, dark messy hair and a thin build with some muscle tone. He is standing with his right arm in the air holding the Axe body wash over his head pouring it onto himself with his eyes closed and an elated facial expression. The guy has soapy bubbles covering his chest with shower water running behind him and a tile background. He has a spotlight on him illuminating him and part of the background. On the right side of the picture, there is a girl who is very attractive looking; she has long dark hair, a suntanned complexion and has a thin athletic build. She is standing with one arm in the air holding whipped cream above her head and pouring it onto herself. It completely covers her chest. Her mouth is partially open and has a seductive expression. The background is dark and appears she is in a room. The girl has a spotlight on her highlighting her well-defined bone structure and toned arms. She is also wearing make-up and her hair is neatly pushed back in a headband. The advertisement as a whole is in landscape style. Toward the bottom of the picture in front of the guy it says “THE CLEANER YOU ARE” and in front of the girl it says “THE DIRTIER YOU GET”, both are in white lettering and all capitals. In between the white lettering is the Axe shower gel bottle shown, a black bottle with bright orange

This full-page Clear Hair Care advertisement was found in Google Images; this image appeals to consumers by the huge “D_CK” which is thought to spell out dick. The technique was to attract the attention of those with a “dirty” mindset. The advertistment’s purpose was to have the consumers use the product to clean their “dirty” minds. The advertisement’s primary colors consists of black and gray which drags the consumer’s eyes toward the yellow duck. The targeted audiences for this advertisement are teenagers, young adults between 20-30 years old, and hairstylists.