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Semiotics In Advertising

1254 Words6 Pages

Advertising is the practice of drawing attention to a product or service to increase trade or sales. Advertisements are tools of persuasion, used to influence and convince the viewer (which is also the consumer) to buy and use their products. ‘Advertisers rely on a handful of Epicurean themes to peddle their products.’ ( ) In this essay I will be discussing how advertisement reinforces hegemonic representations of gender, race and class in a South African context in the BIC advertisement used to mark Women’s Day in 2015. By using Gramsci’s theory on hegemony, I will prove this by conducting a semiotic analysis of the advertisement.

Semiotics can be defined as the ‘study of signs and sign systems.’ (O’ Shaughnessy, M. Stadler, and J. 2012.) P. 131) Semiology needs to occur before analysing any type of advertisement. According to (Peters, J. M, 1987) the basic principle of semiotics is that meaning, interpretation and ways of seeing and understanding signs are made by the development of acts and objects which function as ‘signs’ in relation to other ‘signs’. By understanding language semiology helps to interpret and decode an advertisement in depth to understand the proper meaning it is trying to convey to the audience. ‘The goal of semiotics in the study of advertising is ultimately to unmask the arrays of hidden meanings in the underlying level. ( ) Semiotics operates through a basis of signs; these signs stand for or represent something else. These levels of

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