Select a full page advertisement from a popular mass audience magazine (e.g., Time, Newsweek, Glamour, Sports Illustrated) and write a 3-5 page, double-spaced analysis of the principle signifying practices the advertisement invokes. How does the ad make meaning? What are the signs in the ad? What are the denotations? the connotations? Does the ad use metonymy? indexical signs? What paradigms does the ad invoke and create? Does it use any syntagmatic systems of meaning? Does it involve myths? What cultural code systems does the ad appeal to? How do the patterns of signification in the ad articulate social codes about things such as power, race, class, gender, respect, or authority? (You may want to print out this set of definitions to help you with this.)
Just about any ad will do, but it's a good idea if you select something you find interesting (or appalling). It's also good to stay away from ads that have lots of detailed information about the product (e.g., herbicide ads for farmers). Ads for well-known and unimportant products are usually the most interesting, such as ads for beer, liquor, cigarettes, beauty items, soft drinks, sports cars, corporate image ads, etc. Feel free to discuss your analysis with others from the class, as long as your ad is different from theirs.
Recommended Structure
A good way to begin your analysis is to try to reconstruct, in your first paragraph, what happens when you first looked at the ad. What did you notice first? Why did it grab your attention? What did it make you think of? Do you notice anything else after looking at the ad for a while? What happened when you read the written copy -- did it, perhaps, change your understanding of the pictures? Once you've done that in your first paragraph, begin to explain how the ad works, starting from denotations and working up from connotations through codes and ideologies. So the second paragraph should be about denotations, the third perhaps about the most direct connotations, the fourth perhaps about some paradigms, and so forth.
Two useful analytic techniques can help you interpret an ad:
1) Imaginative Substitution: You can often identify cultural codes in the ad by using imaginative substitution (also known as the commutation test): what would happen if the ad used a model that was the opposite sex? A different race or age? What if the background were different? Answering questions like these helps develop an understanding of the key signifying elements of the ad and the ways that they relate.
2) Ask: What does the ad assume you know? Most ads would not make sense if you did not already know a lot. If I say “Mary had a little . . . “ you know what comes next because you and I both know the nursery rhyme. I can assume you already know the nursery rhyme. Similarly, when advertisers make an ad for Coke or Budweiser or Marlboro cigarettes, they can assume you already know a great deal about those products. But there are also many more subtle things ads assume: about beauty standards, perhaps, or about social class, or about families. These assumptions are not all neutral: often an ad asks the reader to take on a perspective, a point of view on things, that if you think about them explicitly, you may not agree with them. Sometimes ads ask of a reader to assume things about themselves, to assume the point of view of a particular kind of identity or subjectivity. (This is known as interpellation.) These assumptions that are structured into a text are usefully called “the conditions of intelligibility,” that is, the conditions that need to be in place for a text to make meaning.
Things to avoid:
Do not talk about how effective or ineffective the ad is in selling the product. Do not talk about what the advertiser is trying to do, about what the advertiser’s intention is. The point of this kind of semiotic analysis is to see what the ads tell us about society and culture, not to evaluate the ad’s effectiveness. Do not claim that the ad makes people think that if they buy the product, they will be like the beautiful or famous person in the ad. (People are not that stupid; ads work by involving the audience in building systems of meaning, not by tricking them.)
Don't just provide a laundry list of things you notice about the ad. Use the terminology and principles explained in class and in the reading. (Avoid saying things like “the ad gives the viewers meanings,” “the ad tells us,” “the ad implies,” “the advertiser wants the reader to believe,” “the ad makes the reader want x,” or other colloquial language for explaining what’s going on. Use semiotics!) Write your analysis in the form of an essay, in a clear and interesting way. There is no one correct way of explaining the systems of meaning-making in the ad; writing a good analysis involves some imagination as well as accuracy. Keep it short, but spend some time working on it. It will be easy to fill up a page or two with random comments about the ad, but difficult to provide comments that are illuminating, precise, and thorough.
To get a sense of what these look like, there are examples of good student semiotic analyses here, here, here, and here.
Please include the ad or a scan of it with your essay, in .pdf format, and make sure to use page numbers. The assignment is due before class, via email, Jan. 25th.