The Power behind Images: Advertisement Discourse in Focus

Global Social Sciences Review, 2021

The present research, "A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Linguistic Features of Billboards", has been accomplished in order to make a comprehensive analysis of the fact how advertising is manipulating and altering the basic philosophies, dogmas, creeds and ideologies of the common people. Advertising is a vast field, and it has influenced the lives of all of us in the last decades. Keeping this factor in view, the researcher has made an attempt to uncover those aspects which remain hidden in the glamorous and eye-catching commercials which contribute to the capitalist's efforts to make maximum profit by thrusting his products on the customers. The researcher has done the linguistic analysis by using Norman Fairclough's model of Critical Discourse Analysis (1993) of the billboard advertisements. The researcher has analyzed the language and images used on the billboards and had made an attempt to find out the basic notions for which these linguistic expressions ha...

Anatolian Journal of Language and Education, 2023

Today, many advertisements are presented in various media such as printed or social media with interesting, creative, attractive and persuasive appearances. In these advertisements, the common use of verbal and non-verbal signs and the development of conspicuous language phenomena have made it necessary to explore the advertising discourse and analyze the desired message. For this purpose, in this study, four different English advertisements of Starbucks, a very popular coffee brand, were examined from the perspective of ‘‘Critical Discourse Analysis’’. This study mainly focuses on how the use of language and visual design in the advertisements of the relevant brand affects customers. To analyze the effects of linguistic and visual elements on the preferability of products, qualitative research was conducted on four different Starbucks advertisements in Turkish and English, adopting Fairclough's (1992) Critical Discourse Analysis framework. The obtained data were analyzed by making a thematic analysis. The findings showed that the brand uses a variety of strategies to influence customers’ perceptions, with relevant social media advertisements using approaches such as ‘seasonal drinks’ and ‘individuality’ to encourage the purchase of products. As a result, it can be stated that Critical Discourse Analysis is an effective approach that allows the methods of influencing people in creating meaning and the examination of these effects in different social contexts.

2013

Today, consumption of many products which are not different from each other when their usage values into consideration play a role for the formation of social identities of individuals. At this point, advertisers -to increase the consumption-emphasize that people may have extra positive values in the social structure by having "that" product which is advertised. For this purpose, advertisers use various methods to influence and persuade. One of these methods is to create a rhetorical form of expression in the advertisement. Rhetoric which is the purpose to persuade the audience with the usage of figurative language is a method used in advertising communication today. Moreover, this usage in advertising communication does not need only the formation of verbal figures. Figurative expression created through visual images is analyzed into the area of rhetoric and it is called as "visual rhetoric." At this point, in an effort to create a visual rhetorical language, variety of visual elements used as a message transmitter in the advertisements. One of these, the usage of artwork images in advertisements to constitute a visual rhetorical language. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to examine the visual rhetorical language of print advertisements which use the well known artworks of Leonardo da Vinci,

Culture is "ordinary" and is simply "the way of life'. If we try to define the culture of the "India today" we cannot turn a deaf ear to the consumerist culture of our country. Advertisements and shopping had penetrated deep into the mind of Indian people, thereby controlling and influencing their way of life, enough to change their outlook towards modern culture. Advertisements are luring people into buying things, out of their interest rather than necessity. In other words, consumption is taken for granted to maintain comfort in life. Copywriters are in search of new vistas and avenues and are leaving no stone unturned to launch their product pleasingly luring. In this endeavour, they eloquently play with human sentiments, emotions and intellect and create a very persuasive verbal and visual rhetoric to inculcate a consumerist culture in the masses. Advertisement, as a popular visual rhetoric, conveys information about a product or service in general and subtly it creates, perpetuates transfer and manipulates culture or way of life of people. The visual rhetoric of some selected advertisements as the pivotal, this study, tries to analyse how meaning is encoded and decoded to create a visual impact in the audience to bring about a desired response towards the product or service in the light of visual semiotics. It also focuses on the positive and negative effects on culture which is subtly communicated through the visual rhetoric.

Advertising exists in numerous forms and is one of the major forces that helps to improve the standard of living around the world. In most of them, language is of crucial importance. Words in advertisements are carefully crafted to meet particular needs such as commercial and social functions. Together, these functions have made advertising become indispensable in the modern world. However, there is a very limited number of studies examine how companies embedded the social service messages and their products in advertisements. This paper presents a discourse study on the print advertisements of a particular theme in Malaysia, that is, Malaysia Day, for social and commercial functions by a telecommunication company. Through linguistic features and semiotic approach (i.e. sense-making), the study revealed that the soft-sell advertisements employed a combination of the four language styles to reflect the norms and values of Malaysia’s multiracial society. Besides language styles, some of the advertisements also included a number of semiotics such as the distinctive unity symbol, the national flag, landscape and historical building to represent the unity of the multiracial Malaysia’s population.

This study examined the 2018 Indomie Goreng advertisement from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) point of view. It focused mainly on how the advertisement created a positive image about the product towards the costumers that actually manipulates the fact that the food actually contains unhealthy ingredients that may harm consumers. The analysis conducted in this study adapted Fairclough's three-dimensional framework and was elaborated with Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). This helped the researchers find out the social wrong in the advertisement and analyze it by supplying linguistic evidences from the advertisement itself, seen through Halliday's SFL in seeing language metafunctions. The result of this study revealed that Indomie as the advertiser and as the one in power portrays a false positive image towards the consumers, which is hidden behind the positive image, through the help of SFL proposed by Halliday. In the analysis, the transitivity seen through the mental and material processes were taken into account. Then, the analysis was also enriched with the explanation on the fact that the advertiser carefully chose the words seen through positive polarity applied. After that, seeing how the messages in the advertisement was also a prominent thing to conduct. Seeing it that was done by the choice of Theme and Rheme, which one became the Theme and the other became the Rheme. Besides evidences from the point of view of language, the influence of the celebrity endorser in the advertisement was also seen important to be a key factor in delivering the positive image intended to manipulate the fact that the food is unhealthy. The celebrity endorsed as the model in the advertisement was the trending topic of society due to his positive image in mass media. Thus, at the end of the analysis, it can be inferred that language, through the careful choice of words and representation through a celebrity endorser, can be a powerful tool to influence others even what is shared is not the truth.

This study was an attempt to investigate the application of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach and Social Semiotic Approach (SSA) proposed by in analyzing ads discourse i.e. an approach that combines textual analysis with semiotic analysis in studying advertising. This combined approach was checked in two sample ads extracted from 'Time' magazine (2000, 2001). As results, two points emerged based on this study. The first was that advertising is a crucial factor in the dissemination of ideological values in any social discourses. The second point was that this discourse is not in any sense neutral. This is mediated, meaning that whatever aspects of social life are represented in the advertising pass through the particular linguistic (cohesion, disjunctive syntax, modality) as well as social semiotic resources (words, images and colors).

Journal of Social Sciences Advancement

Media, nowadays, is an essential factor, and it evokes the feelings of the readers and viewers. People nowadays are more concerned about the issues and events happening in the country and worldwide. Media depicts the picture of the entire world to every individual, and it also shapes their ideas. This study aimed to analyze Pakistani edible oil company advertisements from the perspective of Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The study ascertained how advertisers convince customers to buy the products using certain linguistic choices in a specific context. In order to achieve this purpose, the researcher selected ads from a Pakistani edible oil company named Kashmir Premium Gold Oil. The theoretical framework opted for this study was Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (1993). This framework has been used as it shows the connection between social practices and the properties of language. Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework includes th...

Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies

With the starting of the usage of advertising as an influence and persuasion tool in mass communication, the role of advertisement becomes more important and advertisers use different persuasion techniques to place advertising messages to the mind of their target audiences. In this process, visual elements become important tools of advertisements and especially with using visual figures as rhetorical devices, advertisers try to communicate much more accurately and effectively. Therefore, the present study will focus on the role and usage of visual rhetoric in print advertising and it will show the analysis of two print advertisements which use the artwork images as a rhetorical figure.

make people and customers buy into their ideas, beliefs, or simply their products. The two advertisements analyzed are beauty products which have been selected from internet magazines. The methodology adopted in this study is qualitative method. The first advertisement is analyzed qualitatively in terms of content; there was no focus on a specific theoretical frame work, while the second advertisement analysis is based on Fairclough’s framework, the critical discourse analysis framework. Keywords: critical discourse, analysis, Fairclough’s, advertisements; content