Analyzing Print Advertisements
Chapter 8
Analyzing Print Advertisements
or: Six Ways of Looking at a Fidji Perfume Advertisement
The thing we have to realize about radio and television commercials and print advertisements (and all other forms of advertising as well) is that they are, aside from their commercial functions, works of popular art. Or maybe "commercial" art is a more fitting term. In this chapter and the next I will focus upon print advertisements and television commercials, the two most interesting--from my point of view--kinds of texts. I will use the term text here for both; it is a term conventionally used in criticism nowadays to cover all forms of artworks.
Lotman's Contributions to ...
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amount of information into
the "area" of a very small text...an artistic text manifests yet another
feature: it transmits different information to different readers in
proportion to each one's comprehension; it provides the reader with
a language in which each successive portion of information may be
assimilated with repeated reading. It behaves as a kind of living organism which has a feedback channel to the reader and thereby instructs him. (1977:23)
Lotman's two points are very important for us to keep in mind.
1. Everything in a text such as a commercial is important; and
2. The more you know, the more you can see in a text.
This is because texts store a tremendous amount of information in themselves and are a great deal more complicated than we might imagine. This notion that texts are storehouses of information explains, for example, why we can read novels several times and see films a number of times and still enjoy the experience. That's ...
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the photograph is in color, what colors dominate? What significance do these colors have?
7. How would you describe the two figures in the advertisement? Consider such matters as facial expression, hair color, hair length, hair styling, fashions (clothes, shoes, eyeglasses design and jewelry), various props (a cane, an umbrella), body shape, body language, age, gender, race, ethnicity, signs of occupation, signs of educational level, relationships suggested between the male and female, objects in the background, and so on.
8. What is happening in the advertisement? What does the "action" in the photo suggest? Assume that we are seeing one moment in an ...
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"Analyzing Print Advertisements." Essayworld.com. October 11, 2018. Accessed November 22, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Analyzing-Print-Advertisements/106852.
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