Semiotic analysis of advertising
The semiotic analysis of advertising assumes that their creators design the meanings of advertisements. As well as just asking us to buy something, Williamson argues that advertisements ask us to participate in ideological ways of seeing the world and ourselves. Advertisements make use of signs, codes, and social myths that are already in circulation, and ask us to recognise and often to enjoy them. While reading and decoding the signs in advertisements, we participate in the structures of meaning that advertisements use to represent advertised product, society, and us.
The first step in analysing an advertisement is to note the various signs - those things that carry a meaning - in the advertisement itself. At first sight, most of these signs simply seem to denote the things or people which the images represent, or to denote the referents of the linguistic signs. However, the signs in advertisements rarely just denote something, but have connotations and meanings which come from our culture, some of which we can easily recognise consciously, and others which are unconsciously recognised and only become clear once we look at them.
Analysis identifies the signs in the advertisement, and involves a decision about which social myths the connotations of the advertisement's signs invoke, and see how these mythic meanings are transferred to the product being advertised. The next step is to consider how the mythic meaning constructed in the advertisement relates to our understanding of the real world outside it. 'The technique of advertising is to correlate feelings, moods or attributes to tangible objects...' (Williamson 1994). To possess the product is to 'buy into' the myth, and to possess some of its social value for ourselves.
The photograph of a sexy female in the Diesel Jeans advertisement does not simply denote a particular person who has been photographed. The picture is also a sign which has connotations like seduction, slimness, sexy, etc. Because the sign has these positive connotations, it can work as the signifier for the mythic signified 'feminine beauty'. This concept belongs to society's stock of positive myths concerning the attributes of sexually desirable women. The advertisement has presented a sign (the photographed model) which itself signifies a concept (feminine beauty). This concept of feminine beauty is what Barthes would describe as ...
This is a preview of the whole essay
The photograph of a sexy female in the Diesel Jeans advertisement does not simply denote a particular person who has been photographed. The picture is also a sign which has connotations like seduction, slimness, sexy, etc. Because the sign has these positive connotations, it can work as the signifier for the mythic signified 'feminine beauty'. This concept belongs to society's stock of positive myths concerning the attributes of sexually desirable women. The advertisement has presented a sign (the photographed model) which itself signifies a concept (feminine beauty). This concept of feminine beauty is what Barthes would describe as a mythic meaning. The mythic meaning 'feminine beauty' is carried over onto the name of the jeans, the linguistic sign which appears in the advertisement. The product has been endowed with a mythic meaning.
Diesel seems to work very strongly with the concept of empowerment, since this scene implies that the women are only able to function in this male environment as a result of the clothes they wear.
In this manner, advertisements not only differentiate one product from another, but they also imbue different products with different social meanings. Once products have different social meanings by virtue of the different mythic concepts they seem part of, products become signs with certain social values. Once more, Diesel are selling themselves as a non-conformist clothing company who offer escape for those willing to break from convention.
The overall picture connotes that woman hold ultimate sexual power over men, since the woman looks most commanding with the cigarette. In all this, the men seem to be compliant with the politics of sexuality, as emphasised by the self-satisfied facial expression of the dwarf. All they want to do is 'win' sexual favours. The power, glamour and commercial value of one of the most expensive sports seem to appeal to these women. This notion is certainly utilised by the company, who aims to show that they manufacture sports-wear and club-wear as well as denim and work-wear. So, while the traditional gender roles are questioned, sexuality is used blatantly as these women are seen to be offering their 'services'. A male and a female paired opposition arises, moving on to the central opposition of sexuality and how it is stereotypically defined.
Advertisements can be described as 'intertextual' to the extent they borrow from and refer to other texts. Therefore, it is important to ask who the reader of an advertisement is assumed to be, since the reader's cultural experience of other media texts is the condition of the ad's intertextual effectiveness.
Readers of advertisements tend to be 'positioned' by the advertisement as someone who needs or desires the product. This issue of positioning by the text is central to the way that advertisements (and other kinds of text) have been discussed by semiotic critics. It is generally argued that in order to make sense of the signs in an advertisement, it is necessary for a reader to adopt a particular subject-position. The individual subject (the reader of the advertisement) positions him/her self as a decoder of the advertisement's signs, and as the recipient of its meanings. But this notion of positioning by the text has several drawbacks as a way of describing how people read advertisements. It tends to treat all advertisements as if they much the same, since all advertisements are regarded as positioning the individual subject in such a way as to naturalise a dominant ideology of consumerism. It also tends to treat all individuals in the same way, since the positioning of subjects by the ad's structure of signs is regarded as a general model that applies to all readers.
The theory of textual positioning assumes that there is one 'correct' reading of any advertisement, which is its true meaning. It assumes that the 'scientific' discourses of semiotics and the theory of ideology are more objective than other analytical techniques, and can reveal a 'true' meaning of an advertisement which most readers do not perceive because these readers are in the grip of ideology.
In addition to a picture of a model wearing the Diesel Jeans there is a syntagm of linguistic signs, 'How to Smoke 145 A Day'. A reading or analysis of this advertisement involves identifying the connotations of the signs present within it, and how the anchorage between the picture and the text directs us towards the 'correct' reading of the advertisement. But there are several ways of reading the connotations of the signs in this advertisement, several social myths which the advertisement invokes.
There is a 'relay' between the bra denoted iconically in the advertisement and the linguistic sign 'Diesel Jeans ' that makes it easy to see this is a Diesel Jeans. There is a further relay between the jeans and the linguistic sign 'Smoke', since skeleton signifies health in a cultural code. But the iconic sign of the Diesel Jeans does not anchor the meanings of 'health' here in any obvious way.
The mythic meanings that advertisements generate are usually focused onto products. Advertisements endow products with a certain social significance so that they can function in our real social world as indexical signs connoting the buyer's good taste, trendiness, or some other ideologically valued quality. 'Our' ideological view of feminine beauty is not 'natural' but cultural, as evident in comparative representations of women in the past or in other cultures. Therefore, ideologies are specific to particular historical periods and to particular cultures. So advertisements give meanings to products, to buyers of products and readers of advertisements, and to the social world in which we and the products exist.
In the practice of semiotics, there are three levels at which the meaning of a sign or symbol is decoded. As outlined by Kaushik and Sen (1990) these are:
- The sign itself and the way it conveys meaning;
- The referential system in which the sign is organised and the context within which the process of signification takes place;
- The cultural system or systems of knowledge within which the codes and signs operate.
References
Roland Barthes, Annette Lavers(translator). Mythologies. London: Paladin Grafton, 1972.
Roland Bathes, Colin Smith, Annette Lavers. Elementary in Semiology. London: Paladin Grafton, 1977.
Umberto Eco. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Indiana University Press, 1994.
Judith Williamson. Decoding Advertisement: Ideology And Meaning In Advertising. London: Marion Boyars Publishers, Incorporated, 1994.
