NPF 570 Study Guide - Winter 2019, Comprehensive Midterm Notes - Super Bowl, Serendipity, Semiotics
14 Feb 2019
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NPF 570
Advertising – Day 1
What is Advertising?
• A way to market a product to consumers
• Convincing someone to buy something
• Consumer- someone who purchases something
• Brand- a company that creates/sells products
• “Advertising is the activity of explicitly paying for media space or time in order to
direct favourable attention to certain goods or services”
• 1. Advertisers pay money
o Advertisers > ad agency > ad
• 2. Advertising states its presence
o You know it is an ad
o You know what the ad is for and who is sponsoring it
• 3. Advertising involves persuasion
• 4. Advertising exercises power in society
o Normalizes and familiarizes certain lifestyles (consumerism, capitalism)
What is Consumer Culture?
• “The symbols and messages that surround people about products and services that
they buy and use (that is consume). Consumer culture also involved how people
make meaning from these messages: how we understand ourselves and our lives
though consumer messages”
• Has to do with our expectations and our expectations about class
• Has to do with the internet
• What we wear/do/use in public but also how we present it on social media
• We have a way of reading the codes and conventions being shown and how it
impacts our lives
o Apple computer makes you seem sophisticated
• Deals with the market and the generation of the production cycle
• We have to think about a large and increasing number of goods that are for sale
• The expansion of shopping as a leisure activity
o People hang out at malls and window shop, it is now an enjoyable activity
rather than just going out when you need to buy something
• The history deals with the changes to the market and industrialization that
developed in the 19th century
Susan Strasser: “The Alien Past”
• Begins around 1850 ish with industrialization
o Separation of spheres (work and home)
o “The arena of consumption and of leisure, the domain of women- that
stood apart from and ever opposed a public sphere of men, work and
production”
• Factories took over lots of work that service and housewives could do
• This changed the way public and private spheres operate
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
• Association of men going to work to make money and women loving shopping
• During this period of time after 1850 and to the beginning of the 20th century,
mass communication come into being
o TV, radio
• Brings the idea of consumption to the rest of the world
• Changed social relationships and the way they worked, from singular to mass
• Quality (DIY, made at home, small amounts) and quantity (factory, mass
production)
o Soap made from animal fat vs. creams and luxurious ingredients
• Same function, have different values in the value we assign to them
• Convenience, marketing around things of convenience
• Selling something because its convenience, greater value on our time than us
buying the product
• This didn’t exist before this time
• This changed social life in an amazing way
• “Formerly customers- purchasing the objects of daily life from familiar
craftspeople and storekeepers in networks of relationships based in villages…”
• Women in domestic roles in ads:
o Woman smiling, hugging box of Tide
▪ Tide has what women want
o Woman gets new gas oven
▪ Makes being in the kitchen even greater
• “Everyday objects are artefacts of culture; they represent and are embedded in
human relationships… Everyday objects embody both the relationship and
routines of private life and the social relationships of production and distribution”
• Items are produced, items are sold, the cycle starts over
• In fashion, for women, women are encouraged to follow trends and cycle through
consumer culture
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Advertising – Day 2
Semiotics of Advertising
What is Semiotic Theory?
• The theory of the production/interpretation of meaning
• It is the study of signs
o Actual signs (billboards)
o Representational signs (drawings/paintings/photos)
o Linguistic signs (words/sounds)
• Traced back to Saussure and Peirce
• A sign is composed of a signifier and signified
o A signifier is a vehicle (image, sound)
▪ Red
o A signified is the concept (association, meaning)
▪ Stop
• The word dog is a signifier, the image of the dog is a signified
Roland Barthes
• Argues not only do we have signs and not only do we create associations between
the signified and signifier, but these relations are cultural and ideological
• 1915-1980
• Helped to develop Saussure’s semiotics
• Wrote about the mythologies of objects between bourgeois culture
• “Semiology… aims to take in any systems of signs, whatever their substance or
limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects and the complex associates of all
of these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment:
these constitute, if not languages, at least systems of signification”
o System of signification: happy babies eat Gerber baby food, we associate
this with each other but logically know it is not always true
• 3 kinds of messages
o The linguistic
o The coded (symbolic or connotative)
o The non coded (literal or denotative)
• Denotation- the literal meaning
o The literal thing
▪ Tomato is a tomato
• Connotation- the symbolic meaning
o Association with tomatoes being market fresh
1. Language is coded
• A learned rule for thinking signs to their meanings
• A framework for a shared conceptual connection
• Thus reading images is a process of decoding
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
