Semiotic Analysis of 3 Magazine Advertisements Essay

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).

Advertisements are all over the place. Whether they are on TV, radio, or in a magazine, there is no way that you can escape them. They all have their target audience who they have specifically designed the ad for. And of course they are selling their product. This is a multi billion dollar industry and the advertiser’s study all the ways that they can attract the person’s attention. One way that is used the most and is in some ways very controversial is use of sex to sell products

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

     We live in a fast paced society that is ruled by mass media. Every day we are bombarded by images of, perfect bodies, beautiful hair, flawless skin, and ageless faces that flash at us like a slide show. These ideas and images are embedded in our minds throughout our lives. Advertisements select audience openly and subliminally, and target them with their product. They allude to the fact that in order to be like the people in this advertisement you must use their product. This is not a new approach, nor is it unique to this generation, but never has it been as widely used as it is today. There is an old saying 'a picture is worth a thousand words,' and what better way to tell someone about a product

Advertisements are all over the place. Whether they are on the Internet, billboards, or in a magazine, there is no way of escaping them. They all have their target audience who the specifically created the ad for. In this ad, it targets mainly non-smokers and even smokers. The advertisement we are looking at is a woman’s mouth. Her mouth is slightly open and the inside is swallowed by a black hole. Her bright red lipstick grabs your attention. What disgusts you is her teeth. Her teeth have been replaced with vulgar. Cigarette buds. The advertisement utilizes the three rhetorical appeals of logos, ethos, and pathos through its image and implied meanings. Through this, the image is able to convey a vividsense of disgust and promote awareness.

The rhetorical imagery that is used to portray a man's body is spread throughout the fitness industry and health advertisements. These images are on the cover of well-known magazines such as “FITNESSRX”, distribute worldwide targeting men, ages 18-30. These magazines give a visual rhetoric as a method of persuading beauty, body image, and the pursuit of “perfection”. These companies target young adults because they believe they have the money to buy their products to obtain the body they want or the body portrayed on the cover of the magazine.

Sexualizaton and objectification in the advertisements we see and the media we watch has become a very strong issue in our society. With the idea that “sex sells”, consumers don’t even realize that they’re not viewing the advertisements for what they are, but for the women (or men) that are being portrayed in a very erotic way, posed with whatever product they were hired to sell. Many articles have been written so far to challenge and assess this problem, but one written by Jean Kilbourne (1999), “”Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt”: Advertising and Violence” holds an extensive amount of authority. Using her personal experience with the subject, as well as studies she has conducted herself on the topic of sexualization, she talks about how the amount of sexualization in advertising affects how society views the culture and products consumers buy. She also notes that because of the quantity and prevalence of these ads, the rate of all forms of sexual assault, specifically rape (mostly towards women of all age), increase, as well as other forms of assault. It is important to examine Kilbourne’s use of rhetorical devices, such as ethos, pathos, and logos, and how effective these devices make her article. This way, it can be examined for its validity and her understanding of her own research. Kilbourne’s article is very effective through her uses of pathos and ethos, but at the same time, it loses its effectiveness through her absence of a counter-argument, as well as a lack

I think that the main attraction of this advertisement is the woman in the middle. She is strong and confident looking and what woman doesn’t want to be like that? It draws you in to thinking that if you smoked cigarettes like that than you might have the confidence that this woman has.

Everyday we expose ourselves to thousands of advertisements in a wide variety of environments where ever we go; yet, we fail to realize the influence of the implications being sold to us on these advertisements, particularly about women. Advertisements don’t just sell products; they sell this notion that women are less of humans and more of objects, particularly in the sexual sense. It is important to understand that the advertising worlds’ constant sexual objectification of women has led to a change in sexual pathology in our society, by creating a culture that strives to be the unobtainable image of beauty we see on the cover of magazines. Even more specifically it is important to study the multiple influences that advertisements have

Every woman wants diamonds because they are beautiful, rare, and are a symbol of success. There is something about diamonds that make every woman want one. Diamonds make a woman feel bold, sophisticated, and powerful. Something magazine recently published a diamond ad for A Diamond Is Forever.Com. A Diamond Is Forever . Com is a website that does not sell diamonds, but displays all the new styles of diamonds and how to purchase or create the perfect diamond for a customer. In this ad they are advertising a new style of diamond ring called the right hand ring. The advertisement is of a young, beautiful woman staring directly at you with a seductive look. On her right had she is wearing a

The Tiger Beer advertisement shown in the appendix is a clear example of the objectification of women in advertising. The Tiger Beer advert was made to appeal to men from the age of 20 to 60. The advert seeks to get a cheap laugh from the target audience with the image of the woman in a sexual pose and the picture of the beer. The ad promotes the idea that beer is the most

Redbook magazine are devoted to selling products ranging from shoes to shampoo. The entire magazine only has only 210 pages. Approximately 6-8 min of every half hour television show is produced by ad agencies. Americans are bombarded with advertisements. We see them everyday in many different forms and through different mediums. Advertisers study America’s population through a systematic breakdown and analysis of our likes and dislikes in relation to our differences. These differences include gender, sexual orientation, economic status, location, race, ethnicity, and more. Advertisers have substantial knowledge of what appeals to each of these demographics and how these demographics will respond to

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

When an advertiser places one of their advertisements into a newspaper, they want their advertisement to appeal to the readers of that particular magazine. They could have the exact same message, but considering their audience, they could make it more effective if they use a different strategy to market their product. This is very common for advertising strategies to change when the content of the magazine changes. You can relate the way that the magazine producers choose their ads by when Steve Craig says that "…program producers and schedulers must consider the target audience needs of their clients" (162). The types of advertisements are driven by the content of the magazine. Sports Illustrated provides a

This research is a quantitative, cross-sectional, exploratory and descriptive content analysis of selected advertisements from two different magazines published in August 2012 using the nine different creative concepts as main emphasis.