The Language of Advertising
By Balan Andrei Stefan
Ecologie
Anul II
The main question is: Is there a special language of advertaising?
La focuses on the interrelation of language, image and layout. It explores the diswourse between the reader (the consumer of the advertising) and each advertisement;
-it examines certain strategies that may become advertising strategies if considered appropriate such as: connotations, hook lines.
It deals with the relationship within advertising as a type of activity and culture.
Some specialists say: "Make no mistake, advertising w 22222t199w orks, no matter how aware you are of the fact that some people pretend that advertising may work on some individuals only, but never on them and they disconsider advertising and even dismiss all.
The mater of the fact is that advertising can be a very complex system, meant not only for the simply minded.
Eg: British Airways in 1990 paid for a very special
advert, a TV advert, filmed in the
Advertisements are ephemeral in that each one is short-lived but their effects are long standing and cumulative which means , if they are good they leave long tracer of themselves, behind the final effect is that those traces combine to form a body of messages about the product or services advertised and even about the culture that had produced them. These messages can then function both to reflect and to construct cultural values of the powerful groups in society who produced them. Advertisements are in fact forms of discourse which make a powerful contribution to the way we construct our identities. For advents to work they must use our commonly shared resources of natural language in ways that affect us and mean something to us ,the word advertisement comes from lat. "advert ere"= to turn towards something. These are several types of advertising texts. One such type is that in which a product is presented as desirable for some of us to buy. The advertising texts are both informative and persuasive. In the case of each advert one of these two sides is more prominent, the texts that are more informative than persuasive are: university prospects; such texts are sometimes called information texts. Such information texts almost always have a corporate perspective behind them.
Persuasive texts such as political manifestos often try to do their job by the way they present information not by the quantity of information they present.
The manufactures labels on our clothing item quite frequently contain the names of the manufactures are considered a direct strategy meant to get themselves some publicity. When analyzing language of advertising the factor of conscious intentions that exists behind the texts of an advert is to be taken into consideration because its aim is that of benefiting the originator from two distinct point of view: 1. materially
2. through some other less tangible gain such as the enhancement of the status and image of the manufacturer.
Eg:
a T-shirt with a slogan written on it is considered a complicated ed because one can't be very sure who is advertising that- is the manufacturer advertising itself
Is the wearer using that t-shirt advertising his/her personal inclinations /preferences (such as: Save nature?)
is the wearer using that t-shirt or another object trying to advertise his social status, even his wealth
Consequently, when analasing ads the two questions have to be answered:
1. What is being advertised: a product, an idea, a company's image?
2. Who is being advertised?
In advertising special attention-seeking strategies have been developed in recent years and reached increasing levels of sophistication.
The starling image is used when the advertiser adopts the strategy of deliberately upsetting/enraging/irritating the general public in order to draw extra attention.
Eg: Benetton launched a campaign with 2 such startling ads:
a baby being just born
a dying man
Any advert is very revealing of a culture's prevailing ideologies, to consider what is thought shockingly acceptable and what gets accepted as being just bold.
There is another problem: the fact that many ads project women as sexual commodities used to increase the selling of those products. But more recently male physique is also being used in some ads, thing considered very bold and daring.
In advertising of all kinds, paralanguage is used. Paralanguage is considered an umbrella term for all those aspects of communication that surround and support our verbal language in the normal face to face encounters: gestures, physical proximity, clothing, eye contact.
An important fact is that writing itself can be considered a form of image making. That's why there is a clear distinction between handwriting and machine written characters. Handwriting has by far more to do with the human nature, it is more personal and individualistic than machine produced typeface. Because of the characteristics of handwriting, mechanized ways of producing many kinds of personalized-looking handwriting have been create. It is a well known fact that different types of handwriting are likely to suggest different types of the authors of the text. Handwriting versus typed print systems distinction makes lots of subtle interpretations possible.
There are several terms for the people on each side of an ad:
writer vs. reader
producer vs. consumer
addresser vs. addressee
sender vs. receiver
Another controversial point or aspect is whether to use WE or I; the effect being very different:
The use of WE in order to address the reader may have the effect of sounding authoritarian (it is generally interpreted: we, a lot of us, have the following opinion, so we are telling you that...)
the pronoun WE can also have other connotations: territoriality; group definition; corporate ownership
The use of I may sound very personal and individualized, but it is considered that it transmits power and is interpreted as being manipulative, deliberately sentimental, and person to person communicational.
Language is an important part in advertising, little comprehension in this area often leading to missing the target with an advertisement, or making an advertisement backfire. The language of advertising is in many ways different than usual language but it relies on common language for better understanding.
Advertising is a phenomenon met on a daily basis, most of our life being lived within it.
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