The Role Of Semiotics In Advertising

Advertising is a goal oriented field that aims at delivering the wanted message to the seeked or wanted audience at the right time. It tries to turn an idea into a message using creativity, as well as, other characteristics such as: relevance, originality, and impact (Wills, Burnett & Moriarity as cited in Baig, 2013). According to Goddard (as cited in Baig, 2013), the word “advertisement” has a Latin root which is the word “advertere”, meaning “to turn towards” or “to change”. The advertising industry started in the 1950s, but did not use subtle strategies at that time. Advertisements try to amuse, inform, misinform, worry or warn people sometimes instead of always trying to persuade them to buy a certain product. The ads that serve to improve or create a change in a certain social behavior or concept without promoting any product are called non-product ads or non-commercial ads.

It became an important approach in the 1960s, when it started to play a major role in relating discourse to ideology. Print ads use a lot of photography that work as a system of signs which can give a meaning to consciousness and reality. Every print ad has two techniques of communication: a verbal technique, and a visual one. Those techniques of communication used in print ads can be represented by using different colors, photographs, and typed words. The more the advertiser uses these sign efficiently, the more he or she can convince the audience to buy the product or buy into the message. Semiotics is usually divided into three branches: Semantics, which relates the signs to their meanings, Syntactics, which describes the relations among the signs in a formal structure, and finally pragmatics, which relates the signs to each other using

In 2006, Kress and Van Leeuven introduced a visual code. They think that both visual and verbal framework can be used to express any cultural happening. They believe that visual structures can refer to certain interpretations of experience, and sorts of social interactions, the same as linguistic structures can do. Kress and Van Leeuven are certain that design, production, and interpretation can establish meanings using different modes of analysis (as cited in Najafian & Dabaghi). They say that the interpretation of the messages is made by the viewer, and that it cannot be fully controlled by the advertiser (as cited in Najafian & Ketabi, 2011). Van Leeuven (as cited in Najafian, and Ketabi, 2011) states that an essential starting point for studying the aspects of visual communication is paying attention to the two verbal and visual modes of communication in print ads, as well as, to the interaction between them. The meaning of the advertisement is interpreted by knowing the relationships between one sign and another and these signs can be linguistic signs (verbal) or iconic signs (visual). In this paper, I will not be talking this principle due to the word