· What is an advertisement?
Advertising is so familiar to modern readers that it may seem odd to ask what an advertisement is. Although advertising is all around us – perhaps because it is all around us – we don’t often pause to think about its nature as a form of discourse, as a system of language use whereby, on a daily basis, huge numbers of readers have fleeting ‘conversations’ with the writers of countless texts.
Now, we will examine the extent of daily discourse, and draw some conclusions about how we might define the act of communication we call ‘advertising’.
We all recognize the type of advertising text that occurs in newspapers and magazines, where a product is being presented as desirable for us to buy; we also know the TV version of this, placed between the programs on certain channels.
The root of the word ‘advertisement’ is the Latin verb ‘advertere’, meaning ‘to turn towards’. While it is undoubtedly true that adverts are texts that do their best to get our attention, to make us turn towards them, we wouldn’t want to say that everything we pay attention to is an advert. For example, road signs such as the ‘speed limit’ one on the list above try to get our attention as an essential part of their function, but we don’t perceive them as advertising anything. Often, though, our classifications are more a question of degree than of absolutes. For example, clothing in its broadest sense can be seen as advertising ideas about the wearer, but manufacturers’ labels on our clothing are a very direct strategy for them to get themselves some free publicity, and this is no different from the names we are forced to carry around on our plastic bags.
Central to our idea of an advert appears to be the factor of conscious intention behind the text, with the aim of benefiting the originator materially or through some other less tangible gain, such as enhancement of status or image. So, although a church poster might not be selling us anything in the material sense, it is still intentionally selling an idea – religion – in order to benefit the institution of the church by drawing converts and swelling its ranks.
Summary: This unit has suggested that advertising is not just about the commercial promotion of branded products, but can also encompass the idea of texts whose intention is to enhance the image of an individual, group or organization. In the process, the idea of advertisements as simple texts which operate on a single level has been challenged: instead, advertising texts are seen as potentially involving complex notions of audience, where readers have to work hard to decode messages and understand different address relationships. While these ideas will be further developed at various points throughout this book, the next unit looks specifically at a range of attention-seeking devices used in advertisements to make the reader want to start the decoding process in the first place.
· Attention-seeking devices
It is not difficult to see why advertisers should want to make their texts capture our attention. The whole aim of the copywriters is to get us to register their communication either for purposes of immediate action or to make us more favorably disposed in general terms to the advertised product or service. But increasingly, written advertisements have to compete with each other and with all sorts of other texts in our richly literate culture. So copywriters have to find ways to shout at us from the page.
IMAGE
One attention-seeking strategy developed in recent years to increasing levels of sophistication is the startling image. It is very revealing of a culture’s prevailing ideologies to consider what is thought shockingly unacceptable and what gets accepted as just bold, if a bit risqué. At the time of writing, women have been used as sexual commodities for many years in the selling of products as disparate as cars and chocolate bars. But male bodies have hitherto been off limits. Things appear to be changing, however. In the search for fresh ways of startling, advertisers seem to have realized that the male physique is uncharted territory.
Adverts can sometimes want to shock the reader for very good reasons, however increasingly, charities and other fund-raising groups have used some of the traditional methods of commercial product advertising to get their campaign noticed, and one of these methods has been the disturbing image, as a way of presenting the case for the need for support.
VERBAL TEXT
The focus so far has been on the idea of images as attention-seeking devices. Just as the way an image is presented can suggest certain ideas, such as the human vulnerability conveyed in the previous advert, so the verbal language can suggest particular qualities as a result of how it appears: in other words, writing is a form of image-making, too. It could be said to have its own paralanguage, as a result of the type of ‘clothing’ the copywriter has chosen for it.
One sharp distinction in how writing appears is whether it is handwriting or typed print, since we are likely to read handwriting as more to do with human agency and therefore more personal and individualistic than machine-produced typeface. These boundaries of ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ are, of course, constructed notions in contemporary society: we have mechanized ways of producing personalized-looking handwriting, and there is a human individual writing what you are reading now. This handwriting versus typed print distinction also masks lots of subtle variation. Different forms of handwriting are likely to suggest different types of author - for example, a rounded, joined-up script with ‘footballs’ or ‘hearts’ for dots over the letter ‘I’ may connote a young writer while an italicized print may suggest someone older; in terms of typeface, too, we are likely to have subtly different readings of different fonts, different styles, different sizes, and also whether the typeface is emboldened (Bold).
LAYOUT
In addition to the effects that can be created by the choice of particular typographical features, writing can also be used to create larger textual shapes by means of different layouts. In this respect, adverts sometimes come very close to the way concrete poetry works - as verbal language making pictures of its own subject matter.
In considering layouts and the other graphological devices (features associated with the visual aspects of texts), space is as important a consideration as verbal and non-verbal language. Empty spaces are as meaningful as filled ones. Where we expect language to occur, its nonoccurrence is in itself an attention-seeking device.
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