Semiotic Analysis Paper

What does an ad say about a society? When viewing a product advertisement, many people never stop to think why the ad and product appeals to them. However, when a more critical look is taken, it’s easy to see precisely how ads are carefully tailored to appeal to trending values of a targeted demographic, and how that makes it easy to examine the society of those whom the ad is targeted at. In the analytic writing Advertisements R Us, Melissa Rubin provides an excellent example of this, as she crafts a logical and clear analysis of a 1950’s Coca-Cola magazine ad which thoroughly explains how advertisements can reveal quite a great deal about the society in which they were created.

The first advertising technique Schor examines is the idea of street-culture and the cool edginess inherent within. Street life, particularly in this article, describes the culture present in inner cities and is a lifestyle most commonly associated with poor blacks. Advertisers use the image of a hardened neighborhood affected by violence, drugs, and criminality to sell the cool feeling of faux danger to the middle class. Rap stars and athletes are often used to make products seem cool and “street”. While these people may have had past connections to true street life, they are now wealthy enough to live luxurious lifestyles,

For the longest time now, advertising has played a huge role in how we identify ourselves in the United States with the American culture, and how others identify themselves with all the cultures of the rest of the world as well. It guides us in making everyday decisions, such as what items we definitely need to invest our money on, how to dress in-vogue, and what mindset we should have to prosper the most. Although advertising does help make life easier for most, at the same time it has negative affects on the people of society as well. Advertisement discreetly manipulates the beliefs, morals, and values of our culture, and it does so in a way that most of the time we don’t even realize it’s happened. In order to reach our main goal of

With the proposed concepts, such as branding in commercialism, High Culture/Low Culture, and the false promises made in uniform products, one is granted to see today’s society as hovering closely to a capitalistic system set up to facilitate the vast desires of the masses. As Adorno and Horkheimer bluntly put it, “personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions” (71). We can only think of ourselves as just another gear in the American machine, churning away endlessly and waiting to be fed with the uniformity of culture, the greed, manipulation, and

Through various examples, Harold demonstrates culture jamming as an active role against growing capitalism. Harold notes that society has adopted a consumer-based culture and is no longer moral or value motivated. The author uses the words ‘culture jamming’ to describe the objective of marketing rhetoric of multinational corporations through sabotage, media hoaxing and billboard liberation. Culture jamming is used to disrupt mainstream media institution used by individuals who value anti consumerist social movements. The article begins by discussing Adbusters Blackspot anti ad campaign, which emphasizes the counteracting of popular advertisements. They create popular parody’s, making fun of marketing and advertisement campaigns, throughout magazines in hopes to expose the truth about the large advertisement corporations. Harald believes that parody’s are a form of critique of the advertisement and do not influence change to solve the issue of the ad. Harald views parody’s less effective than pranking, a subset of culture jamming, a change in the ad, producing new shapes and different effects, that attempts social change. Pranking in comparison to culture jamming has the ability to relate stronger messages more clearly against the system of capitalism. It is capable of relaying informational, funny, or insulting messages to a larger group of individuals through analogies. The author also points out Michael Foucault and Gilles Deleuze idea of the disciplinary control of culture. Disciplinary control of culture is seen that as consumers we are constructed as an assembly line style production. Advertisement companies view our beliefs and custom products to fit our needs to maximize their efficiency and profit from the product. Advertisement companies benefit from the anti

In today’s mass media, it is quiet common for advertisers to assimilate class into their commercials. These advertisements portray a certain level of elegance because of the sophisticated choice to use classical background music and thick European accents. On the contrary, other advertisers take the common-folk approach by structure these commercials around the western concept. Both of these advertising tactics supports an American paradox. As argued in Jack Solomon’s “Master of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising”, the contradiction lies in the desire to strive above the crowd and the quest for social equality.

Instead of promoting the usual conformed replicated lifestyle they promoted individualism. Advertisers reassured consumers that they would surely find the self-expression they were in search of within their products. This is evident within the “Forever Young” Pepsi commercial where present advertisers are promoting individualism through the image of rock n roll legend, Bob Dylan. In his essay, Frank states, “We consume not to fit in, but to prove, on the surface at least, that we are rock ‘n’ roll rebels, each one of us as rule-breaking and hierarchy-defying as our heroes of the 60’s, who now pitch cars, shoes, and beer” (Frank 153). During the 1960’s Bob Dylan revolutionized what it meant to be an individual. Through his music many people started to express what they were feeling and how it was affecting them and rebelled against the pressures of society. Pepsi using Bob Dylan as the protagonist of the commercial symbolizes the desire for people to explore what it means to be a carefree rock ‘n’ roll legend that lives life on a spectrum outside of the guidelines that society already has set in place. Bob Dylan’s purpose in the Pepsi commercial is to directly represent rebellion and individualism. This advertisement pushes the concept that consumers too have the potential to be as inspiring as said legend if they continue to take apart in whatever is being sold. Pepsi’s commercial expresses that conformity is no longer

The space I chose to observe and write about for this essay is ULTA Beauty in the Greenwood Mall. In this analysis, I will be focusing on the impact of advertisements and products within class, gender, and beauty through the study of semiotics, connotation, and denotation. ULTA sells haircare products, skin care products, perfumes and cologne, high end makeup brands, and drug store makeup brands as well.

In her essay “Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body,” Susan Bordo manages to recognize an underlying fundamental change in society’s attitude towards advertisements and specifically sees that unfold in the growing shift towards male sexually oriented advertisements with a focus on feministic qualities. Furthermore, since Bordo wrote this essay in the 1990s, the advancements in technology have caused growing ideological differences between generations as their responses to things like social media and advertisements elicit contrasting reactions. The Millennials, also known as Generation Y, have been born into the various outlets of social media and have become accustomed to a greater sense of comfort with the Internet as they share all of their life stories and photos with other human beings. On the other hand, Generation X and the Baby Boomers were born into an era that didn’t depend on technology to perform everyday tasks. As a result, their mindsets make them reluctant to the changes in technology, which inadvertently makes them more uncomfortable to any massive changes in social media. By using sexually oriented advertisements, Kraft Foods and Axe, effectively display differing ideological differences between Generation X and Generation Y. In conjunction, Bordo’s elements of the gaze, objectification, and the rocks and leaners pose allow us to better understand the construction of the advertisements and the role they play on influencing each targeted generation.

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.

In “Commodify Your Dissent”, Thomas Frank insists that marketing no longer promotes conformity but, rather, promotes “never-ending self-fulfillment” and “constantly updated individualism” (para.6). I totally agree with the author. America is all about the idea of rebellious, finding different and being different. The idea of counterculture exists even early 1960, and it was never to stop. For example, jeans were made for the mine-workers; and it not suppose to wear outside of the house. However, the baby boomers decided to make a different, made jeans to be a trend fashion and wear it everywhere. American are always aiming differences and make it to be the trend, especially young people. Therefore, the producers create commercial, advertisement

On May 22, 1856 pro-slavery Congressman Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina wanders into the United States Senate Chambers, in Washington D.C., and beats anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner with a golden topped walking cane. Brooks repeatedly strikes over and over until the cane becomes nothing but a splintered stick. Meanwhile, Sumner lays unconscious and covered in his own blood. This attack occurs because Brooks wants revenge. Earlier that day Sumner presents a speech, during which he criticizes the Southern slave owners for the violence that occurred in Kansas. Also, Sumner charges Brooks’s cousin, Andrew Butler, who is also a South Carolina Senator, as having a lover who seems ugly to most but is always enchanting to him, Slavery.

With consumer culture rapidly increasing, commercialism is at its peak. Branding has become an identity; the way the public defines itself and actively relies on it to express its beliefs and personality. The consumerist community is heavily influenced by graphic designers through form of advertisement, designed to reflect the mass-media networks in a sophisticated manner. (J. Berger). A study by Daniel Yankelovich shows that an individual living in a city 30 years ago, experienced approximately 2,000 ads messages a day, compared to estimated 5,000 today (Yankelovich,). By visually communicating a message, graphic designers influence society’s decision making therefore, being accountable for the message they are conveying, whether it is positive or negative.

A ‘commodity sign’ invests symbolic meaning in products or services as a signifier with an image as signified. In recent times, consumer culture is driven by our desire for superfluous wants, causing the production and consumption of commodity signs to become more specialised according to the notion of capital. Capitalism is characterised by economies that are based on open markets and the ethos of individuality over community. French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (Distinction 1984) introduced the schema of subcultural capital, which ‘confers status on its owner in the eyes of the relevant beholder’ (Thorton, 2006: 100). Therefore people have the idea that they can buy subcultural capital, as it is seen as self-revealing, in order to impress people or become someone else (Frith, 1996: 5). Thus advertising was developed as a strategy in generating demand in a contemporary consumer culture. Mass marketing has split the unity of signifiers and signified into a language of appearances and images of which we realise as either visible, physical connections or indirect connotations to that which they represent.

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