Textual Analysis In Advertising

As reflected in the readings of Reading Popular Culture: An Anthology for Writers 3rd Edition, present-day advertisements expand far beyond the endorsement of a product. While the initial intent for various corporations surround the operation of selling and marketing products, many companies also find success in promoting masked messages. According to Jean Kilbourne in her article pertaining to the study of advertisement, she reveals the underlying tactics of commercialized business. As stated in the article “’In Your Face…All Over the Place’: Advertising Is Our Environment”, Kilbourne states “advertising often sells a great deal more than products. It sells values, images, and concepts of love and sexuality, romance, success, and perhaps most important, normalcy (101).” The most recent trend of cultural normalcy: the distaste for natural aging.

When viewing advertisements, commercials, and marketing techniques in the sense of a rhetorical perspective, rhetorical strategies such as logos, pathos, and ethos heavily influence the way society decides what products they want to purchase. By using these strategies, the advertisement portrayal based on statistics, factual evidence, and emotional involvement give a sense of need and want for that product. Advertisements also make use of social norms to display various expectations among gender roles along with providing differentiation among tasks that are deemed with femininity or masculinity. Therefore, it is of the advertisers and marketing team of that product that initially have the ideas that influence

Advertising is displayed all around the world for everyone to see and it sometimes gives a bad message to the viewers. Advertisements tell us that there is only one dominant way to be feminine and only one dominant way to be masculine and if you do not conform to these gender codes that is not considered normal. Unfortunately, I have caught myself following these gender codes that are shown in advertising, it has affected me with the way I see people and myself. By using a sociological perspective I have started to look into the advertisements that I see and understand how women are portrayed as helpless and weak while men are portrayed as powerful and dominant. I also looked into how advertising supports hegemonic masculinity, which is the idea of masculinity being dominant. (Ravelli and Webber 2016: 203).

Advertising is a form of propaganda that plays a huge role in society and is readily apparent to anyone who watches television, listens to the radio, reads newspapers, uses the internet, or looks at a billboard on the streets and buses. The effects of advertising begin the moment a child asks for a new toy seen on TV or a middle aged man decides he needs that new car. It is negatively impacting our society. To begin, the companies which make advertisements know who to aim their ads at and how to emotionally connect their product with a viewer. For example, “Studies conducted for Seventeen magazine have shown that 29 percent of adult women still buy the brand of coffee they preferred as a teenager, and 41 percent buy the same brand of mascara” (Source

existent. It is widely believed that we live in a man’s world. Even something as common

One aspect of an author’s argument is their ethical character. This is important in assessing how credible and fair the author is being when considering their subject. [Transition] Jean Kilbourne has spent most of her professional life studying and analyzing women in advertisements. She has produced the award winning documentaries Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women (1979) and Slim Hopes, serves on the Massachusetts Governor’s Commission on Sexual and Domestic Abuse, and is a senior scholar at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College (420). Kilbourne appears to be qualified to speak on the matters of women and advertising and a reader can trust that she has done the necessary research to have an informed opinion them.

The average American will spend around a year and a half of their lives watching television commercials (Kilbourne 395). Presently advertisements are controlling our everyday lives. In Jean Kilbourne’s article: “Still Killing Us Softly: Advertising and the Obsession with Thinness”, she discusses how advertisements negatively portray women. This negative portrayal leads to self-hatred and a negative self-image for women. A major point of this is the idea of excessive thinness for women, which the advertising industry is dominantly influencing how women need to meet this standard. Kilbourne argues that advertising and the media cause women to believe this is the only standard and we must meet it. A recent advertisement in Glamour magazine for Kashi cereal “GoLEAN Crunch”, is a great example of how women are represented and materialized in today’s society. This advertisement supports and contradicts Kilbourne’s argument that advertisers depict women as powerless, in-shape and perfectly beautified to meet the standard created by the media.

A magazine advertisement by the non-profit organization States United to Prevent Gun Violence effectively broadcasts their message against gun violence, yet also shows a prejudice towards women by portraying them as inherently more vulnerable and weaker than men. The advertisement is of three black silhouettes layered atop each other in this order, from back to front: a man, a woman, and a child. There's a small cross starting from a red X in the middle of the baby's silhouette and expands horizontally and vertically outwards onto the woman's silhouette as 9s then 8s, but ends before it crosses onto the man's silhouette. In the upper left corner there is a blank table with columns marked “number of hits” and “shot value” and rows marked with

The objectification of women contains the act of ignoring the personal and intellectual capacities and potentialities of a female; and reducing a women’s value/worth or role in society to that of an instrument for the sexual pleasure that she can produce in minds of another. The representation of women using sexualized images that have increased significantly in the amount and also the severity of the images that’s been used explicitly throughout the 20th century. Advertisement generally represent women as sexual objects, subordinated to men, and even as objects of sexual violence, and such advertisements contribute to discrimination against women in the workplace, and normalize attitudes which results in sexual harassment and even violence

Nowadays, in society, the role of male and female have changed dramatically, as opposed to the prominent roles in history. Today women are changing to break out of the mold that which our society has placed her in. This is cannot be when it comes to role representation in the different advertisements. Nowadays different organization from medium to large are spending millions of dollars on developing their marketing strategies. They spent countless hours to study their target audience to study them so that they can attract them a better way to their competitors.

The portrayal of women in advertising has always been a controversial subject in today’s society. On one hand, you have what the world defines as beauty, while on the other you have an aspect of appeal. Advertisements have to appeal to the masses, regardless of the target audience. However, sometimes this attempt to appeal can go too far. Advertisements have put out an image of a woman that is simply impossible to achieve, a standard that has led to the shaming of many woman across the years. However, what makes advertisements like this so popular and effective despite this?

Sex sells. In fact, sex sells so much that according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey, there is an average of about 293,066 victims of rape and sexual assault each year. It is not uncommon to see women featured in advertisements in a sexual way, sometimes violently. Often times, women in both media and advertising are portrayed in a way that reduces them to nothing more than an object for a strong male figure to use at will. This type of advertisement sends messages to both men and women, that women should be submissive, and men should be dominant, leading to more violence in women.

A multimodal discourse analysis will be used to interpret various concepts in the Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) advertisement. The Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) framework for interpreting visual signs will be utilised to analyse an advertisement with the purpose of indicating how visual and verbal signs in the advertisement are used to make meaning. It will also be used to indicate how visual and verbal signs are utilised and relate with each to make meaning.

Television serials, movies and advertisements – these all contain powerful depictions of the ‘ideal man’. In an endeavour to sell their products, the advertisements at times circulate certain problematic images which eventually become dominant in society. For example, how using a women’s face cream can be a deterrent for a male to be a “banda”. Aindrila Chaudhuri of Tata Institute of Social Sciences writes: “Most of the times, logic takes a backseat but then again, in the era of heightened consumerism and capitalism, can you really expect the companies or the adverting agencies ,who by the way, are looking for profit maximisation, to do anything other than that... which is simply increasing profits! They aren’t really seeking to educate the