Understanding The Underlying Tricks Behind Advertisements

According to post structuralist theorists, there is an inevitable slippage or failure built into all language. By relating this to advertising, we find that there will always a gap between the intended and received message. Illusions, visual markers, language are all ambiguous and reveal a political meaning behind the assumptions made by advertisers. Certain interpretative frameworks and connotations are meant to be universal: heteronormativity, specific conceptions of gender, wealth accumulation. In order to understand the underlying tricks behind advertisements, mainly employ a technique called semiotics. The use of semiotics can demonstrate that beyond the obvious message of the advertisement there are subtler hidden meanings. In†¦show more content†¦Bignell provides an example of this through the Volkswagen Golf Estate commercial in which they reference Dr Who with the intention of specifically targeted consumers that would have been in their youth when the content borr owed was aired and now in their 30s, ready to buy a family vehicle. This specific technique is an intertextual methodology in which the text ‘borrows from something and refers to another.’ Right ow the ‘hard sell’ in sales has been replaced by a more defused range of functions, rendering advertisements harder to decode by the average joe. Bignell also argues that it’s normal for advertisements to be always perfuming additional functions as well as selling the product. They succeed in putting things in context and creating structural frameworks of meaning. They frame the way we view the world and constitute how we place our selves in it. In a way it has replaced art, music and religion in helping us define and develop our personal identities. It’s he ironic shared knowingness between the advertiser and consumer has fostered the relationship over twenty years. There are specific advertising discourses in the UK press that range from travel, insu rance and loans. Each discourse is not seen as marketing a particular product but rather succeeding creating new modes of consumption that will be essentially normalised into society. They do this by