Understanding Advertising

• What identities does the ad produce? 
• In what way does it construct them? 
• What is the ideal state and status it suggests us? 
• What anxieties about oneself can it trigger? 
• It is also crucial to consider the personalities of actors that present the brand. As Borgerson and Schroeder state it, “pictures of people – models, celebrity endorsers, spokespersons, “average” consumers, managers and employees – make up a large part of marketing imagery” (2005). 
• Ask yourself, what meanings do the actors bring? 
• What do they mean to us in their sign systems (film\fashion\sport industry or politics)? 
• Why do you think they were selected to present the brand you analyze? 

•  Modern advertising imagery seeks to sell us not just products  but images of ourselves
• Advertising represents ideal states, causing insecurity about one’s social position \ body \ status or something else.
• Thus the work of advertisement is not to invent a meaning for No.5, but to translate meaning for it by means of a sign system we already know. It is only because Catherine Deneuve has an ‘image’, a significance in one sign system, that she can be used to create a new system of significance relating to perfumes. If she were not a film star and famous for her chic type of French beauty, if she didn’t mean something to us, the link made between her face and the perfume would be meaningless.
• Myths;
• Claude Levi Strauss-all data is arranged according to the universal laws of human thought
• general scheme for all myths-they are similiar throughout the world
• Binary opposition, good/bad, black/white
• each myth has a common special mission, 
• each myth has a mediator to help bridge binary opposition, life vs. death=zombie, half in both worlds
• Vladimir Propp-analysed russian folktalkes, developed a typology of 31 narratives structures that are continually repeated in myth. 
• all adventures of the hero lead him to a new state, a poor man becomes rich, a fool becomes clever. 
• Many advertisement use this, a product, to overcome a problem.