A Critical Analysis of Some Advertising
As already indicated above, the purpose of this assignment is to achieve that critical refocusing of your attention from the task of being a successful consumer to the work of analyzing, from a semiotic perspective, the way advertising seeks to inform and influence consumer feeling, thinking, understanding, and behavior. That is, you will be using a semiotic analysis to examine an ad, identifying its appeal to and its projection of beliefs in the consumer, thereby taking that critical half-step aside from the transaction which will enable you to understand better what it involves. That it may be your own response which can be examined in this way reveals the powerful advantage to be achieved in critical reflection. Again, a semiotic analysis would involve regarding the ad as a complex of signs to be interpreted for its significance or meaning in the context of a sign system. The essays assigned in this unit provide a broad source of observation and insight for you to draw on.
Choose an advertisement (or some group of ads you feel for your purposes can be usefully grouped) and, with attention to the salient details, interpret what is being communicated to the consumer. With reference to significant features of the ad(s), both images and copy (i.e., text), discuss how consumers are invited to see themselves, the world, and the options available to them. The character of this invitation should be articulated in terms of the beliefs or myths implied in the ad and thereby reaffirmed in the consciousness of its target audience.
If you feel you cannot find enough to say about one ad, you may choose several ads of some certain types allowing you to develop a thematic argument examining the way the ads agree or disagree in their conception of types of consumers, their lives and interests, the opportunities and challenges of modern life, or whatever. These ads may come from the print media (newspapers or magazines), radio, TV, or any mixture of the several media. If it is possible for you to send it or provide a link to it, it would be nice to be able to see a copy of the ad you are talking about. However, I am expecting your description of the salient features of the ad(s) to be clear enough for me to know what you are talking about even if I were not seeing the ad(s) for myself. (See the brief comments on Jack Solomon’s essay above.) Your conception of a semiotic analysis of the ads as complex signs should be informed by the general introduction to the textbook and the introductions to Chapters 1 and 2; and your analysis should make use of material from at least two of the five essays assigned in Chapter 2.
It will be much preferred if your inclusion of material from the critics is neither perfunctory nor clumsy (often the results of students sticking in something from the critics simply in order to satisfy the requirement that they include something from the critics). While you may find yourself choosing to examine ads unlike anything the critics discuss, a careful, thoughtful reading of the critics should equip you with a developing grasp of general principles either applicable or not, but in either case useful to define (if only by contrast) what you find at work in the material you examine. Again, your aim in this course is to become an active and thoughtful enough reader to then be able (as a writer) to enter as an informed participant into the discussions already underway in what you read.
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