C103 - The Semiotics of Advertising
Week 9 Lecture Notes
Monday 10/20/2025

Business & Organizational Matters

• Zoom!
  • Regular (recurring) link for Monday afternoon lectures: https://iu.zoom.us/j/86945286616?pwd=tbzWSyNQJgDU2UG223wGmuOibubcaa.1
• Textbook
  • Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics (Routledge, 4th edition)
  • The IU Library makes available an e-edition with unlimited simultaneous access, so that should be available to you at the following URL: https://proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/login?url=https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781003155744 
  • As noted in the syllabus, you can either use the textbook online, or you can download it in either pdf or epub versions for off-line use. 
  • I have tested this, and it works for me. If you have any problems accessing it, let me know and we'll try to figure it out.   
• Course website
  • URL (be sure to bookmark it): https://www.gfowler.net/c103/index.html
• Instructor information
• Syllabus
• Assignments, grading, and course requirements
• Course goals
• The Zoom lecture
• When I am sharing my screen, like now, I only see about 5-6 video feeds. If you put up the hand-raising flag, I am not sure I will notice it, or even be able to see it.
• Just speak up and interrupt me. I won't be irritated. I will also hang around for a few minutes at the end of each lecture, in case you want to bring anything up with me immediately after the lecture.
• If you put a question or comment in the Chat during lecture, I probably won't see it either. However, I will try to remember to look at that at the end of class, and respond then to anything there. You can also stay connected at the end of lecture and have a word with me then. I will try to remember to stop the recording before we have a private exchange. Don't hesitate to remind me if you see the Zoom feed is still being recorded.
• I will record each lecture and post it to Canvas within a couple of hours of when it takes place. If you prefer to view the recorded lectures, you can in effect turn this course into a 100% asynchronous online course. If you attend the lectures in real time, you are keeping it as a hybrid type of course. I like to have some people at the live lecture on Mondays, because it gives me a more interactive, less isolated feeling. If you are in the lecture, you at least have an opportunity to interject a question during or at the end of the class. If you just watch the recorded lecture, you are stuck with what gets recorded. It's entirely up to you how you treat the lectures.

For next Monday's lecture

• Please read Chapter 1 of Chandler, "Models", pages 13-68.

For the rest of this week

• You will need to look at the asynchronous material provided and do the associated writing assignments
• Each week we will have three "bundles" of asynchonous material, consisting of some notes and some linked media materials (infrequently, something else).
• Here are links to this week's bundles:
• Bundle 1, due by Friday 10/24 at 11:59 pm.
• Bundle 2, also due by Friday 10/24.
• Bundle 3 , also due by Friday 10/24.
• The weekly asynchronous written assignments should be no more than 1 page or so, single-spaced; Submit them on Canvas, where the precise assignment will be appear as a numbered Assignment. Five formats can be submitted: .docx, .doc, .pdf, .rtf, .txt.
• The first week's assignments are just intended to get you thinking about advertisements. Think of these questions as a kind of warm-up for the rest of the course. Hopefully you will start to realize that they can have interesting aesthetic or intellectual appeal. And these initial assignments will help give you a better sense of the kinds of things we are looking for in this course.
• In Canvas, the assignments will be set to appear just before the time of each weekly lecture, so you will have access to all the materials for each week at that time.
• It's important to bear in mind that questions relate to the material immediately above it (usually one or more ads). If I have worded something poorly and you are not completely confident what a question relates to, feel free to shoot me an email to ask for clarification. I spend most of my time at the computer with my email open, so I tend to respond pretty quickly. Similarly, if a link ever fails to work for you, please notify me as soon as you find it and I will correct the problem as soon as possible. If you are the first to attack and particular assignment and notice a broken link, you can save your fellow classmates a lot of trouble (not to mention me!) if we get this corrected right away.
• I have posted a weekly office hour from 5:00-6:00 on Wednesday via Zoom (not at the lecture link, but at my regular standing Zoom room link). (You can get a clickable link from the Instructors page linked above and on the course home page.) That is intended to give you a chance to look at the weekly bundles and come to me with any questions, while still allowing time to actually write up and submit the assignments after speaking with me. You can always email me and ask for later appointment via Zoom (using the office hour link). I can generally accommodate any request like that, I don't have a lot of structured activities on days when I am at home, aside from teaching this course.
• This year I have a graduate student grader, Pedram Aghaalikhani, who will do most of the grading (except for the term papers at the end, which I always grade myself). If you have any questions or complaints about a grade, I suggest that you start with Pedram, and he will consult with me if necessary. Pedram will also refer any suspected AI work to me for review and a decision on any penalties.
• Each writing assignment is nominally worth 20 points, and I have planned for 21 graded bundle-based writing assignments over the 7 weeks of class.
• Important note: Please do the bundles and assignments in their sequential order. In some cases they are intended to flow and build upon each other, and you may miss part of the point if you do them out of order. This is a request/suggestion; I have no enforcement mechanism in place for this.

AI use on bundle assignments (an abridged rant)

• The last four semesters when we have given this course during the second 8 weeks of the semester, we had a huge problem with students using AI systems like ChatGPT to do the bundle assignments.
• It should be really obvious to you that this is unacceptable in this course, or any other course unless specifically authorized by the instructor. IU regards this as a form of cheating, and so do I.
• The syllabus has a two-page-long rant/explanation about why I don't want you to use AI.
• Our experience during this time has taught me some useful lessons in recognizing AI use and penalizing students for it.
• If we spot AI use on any assignment, the result will be a score of zero on that assignment, and I will ask you to meet with me as soon as we can arrange it (via Zoom). If we spot it a second time, the result will be an academic misconduct report to the university (plus a zero on the assignment). Beyond that... but let's not go there.
• All assignments will automatically be submitted to the online plagiarism detection system Turnitin when you submit your work on Canvas. Turnitin includes an AI recognition filter. I realize that it is not infallible, but my now-extensive experience with what AI answers read like will help me confirm likely AI use. A Turnitin flag won't be enough by itself; I must also be confident that it was AI-written. I reserve the right to use additional AI checker programs, but the most important thing is what I think of the assignments, my personal judgment about them.
• I have no objection to students working together on assignments, but only to brainstorm the questions and figure out what makes sense in answering them. It is not acceptable for students working together to turn in identical or cosmetically differentiated assignments. Turnitin is virtually infallible at spotting such things and flagging them for our attention. 
• Last semester seven students out of 60 were caught red-handed submitting AI-generated assignments and subsequently dropped the course. Do you really want to join that group?
• It's also important for you to realize that AI is a pretty mediocre student in this course. It produces answers to questions in the assignments that are imprecise and often gets distracted by material that is not being asked about. AI assignments typically lose several points from the 20 possible on each assignment due to answering the questions generally rather than precisely. In a compressed course like this there aren't so many assignments that you can afford to lose points over and over. Even an average student in this course is typically better at answering the questions than AI is, if they take the questions seriously and answer them directly. And AI doesn't learn from doing the assignments and improve over the course of the semester.
• Some students, when confronted with an assignment that reads like it was AI-written, have explained, oh, I use Grammarly (or some similar program), and that's why it looks like this. Use of Grammarly or other AI-type program to edit your own ideas into more polished prose is not cheating, but I dislike it because it is so hard to differentiate from AI. The syllabus tells you what you must do if you want to use a resource like Grammarly in this course. I won't repeat it today (see the two paragraphs starting with "A separate problem" on p. 3 of the syllabus).
• Final point: a big part of this course requires that you be introspective about your responses to the individual stimuli ("signs") that make up a short text such as an advertisement. I want you to think about how and why you react to these individual signs as you do. AI systems such as ChatGPT have no personality and do not respond with any degree of introspection. All they do is predict the continuation of any text based on a huge but generic database of material. AI use completely defeats the point of taking this course. It also threatens my ability to offer this kind of course in an online format, which is very convenient for students in the summer or the 2nd 8 week curriculum (for students who have to replace a course mid-semester in order to retain their full-time registration). So if you care about maintaining this course as an option for your fellow students, don't push me against the wall by relying upon AI to do your work.

For now

• Why are ads interesting as an object of investigation?
• Compare advertising to poetry as artistic genre
  • Distilled use of communication devices to pack the greatest "oomph" into a small package, to present it in a somewhat oblique way, and to encourage the reader to engage in semiotic decoding of the text to get the full message
  • Overall effect transcends the literal value of what is conveyed
  • So, for example, take this unremarkable but typical poetic fragment by Oscar Wilde:

Excerpt from poem (Oscar Wilde, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol")

Yet each man kills the thing he love
By all let this be heard
Some do it with a bitter look
Some with a flattering word
The coward does it with a kiss
The brave man with a sword

Prose paraphrase

I'd like everyone to know that in a manner of speaking everybody destroys the object of their affection, either openly with violence, or in an underhanded way with flattery and hypocrisy.

• The point is, by having the reader of this passage synthesize the intended meaning from its indirect presentation in the original text, that makes the reader invested in the meaning they have extracted from it. This has more impact on the reader, makes them take it more seriously, because they came up with it themselves.
• This transparent paraphrase is much less effective at getting the reader to embrace the content of the text, the message it seeks to convey. 
• So if we take a "poetic" ad, it will require the same sort of additional effort on the part of the viewer/reader to decode it, and therefore may take the message to heart more than if you just say, "Crest is the best toothpaste". Here's a simple example.
• Scottish Ferry Ad
• What would a prose paraphrase of this ad look like?
  • If you have the need to arrange shipping services for your products, think of P&O Scottish Ferry Co. We deliver all kinds of cargoes to Scotland: trucks, machine equipment, livestock such as lambs, even huge industrial equipment like caterpillars. We deliver all kinds of cargo. Call P&O Scottish Ferry Co.!

The kinds of things that make advertising a non-trivial object of investigation

• I especially like how advertising can serve as a kind of window onto current social concerns.
  • There's a famous statue on Wall Street, placed there in 1987 after a bad short-term stock market crash, intended to signify the strength and endurance of the stock market
    • Can this be regarded as an advertisement?
  • Consider the "Fearless Girl" statue commemorating International Women's Day, representing a Boston financial services firm called State Street Global Advisors. This was placed there in 2017 as an explicit advertisement for a firm that featured an index fund specializing in companies that have a high percentage of women and other diverse groups in their corporate leadership.
  • Front view of statue
  • If we are talking about physical objects, such as these two statues, as advertisements, let's consider a really recent example.
• During the first week of March of this year, this balloon image appeared in New York's Times Square. It amounts to an ad for Kim Kardashian's fashion product line Skims, and it is basically a blown-up sexy, somewhat exaggerated, representation of Kim herself.
• What are we to make of this? I'm sure that can be many ways of thinking about this, but let me tell you what I think.
• First, she is covering up most of her face. While the blow-up doll represents her, and she has widely modeled her own products as part of their marketing, thus fusing her public persona with the abstract persona projected by her product line, this backs slightly away from the personalization, and makes the image more generic, more abstract.
• Her background has some scandalous personal components, such as the explicit sex tape that she deliberately released before she had blossomed into a real celebrity. So the depersonalization of her public persona in this marketing device is a way of saying, don't think of me when you think of Skims, think of any sexy person wearing the product.
• And it is ironic that this balloon was placed in Times Square. Historically, beyond your personal memory but not beyond mine (!), Times Square was a center of the low-class sex industry in New York City, with cheap sex shops, porn shops, and hookers hanging out on the corners. Times Square has basically cleaned up its act since then, becoming a family-friendly tourist destination with giant Disney posters on display. Placing this balloon image of herself there, but depersonalizing it, says to the public: "Well, I used to be like Times Square was, but now I am like Times Square has become, sexy, but not raunchy." And it is reported that nobody who passes by this balloon seems to be offended. People were amused, they were taking selfies of themselves in front of it.
• On some level, Kim Kardashian reflects the mood of the consumer base she attempt to appeal to. She is a celebrity for our times.
• I won't show it to you in this lecture, but if you'd like to read a bit more about this marking event, here's an article about it from the New York Times that I have saved to pdf for archiving.
• Here's another really striking ad with two major pieces to the visual image (what we will come to call "signs" next week). This ad was released long before 9/11 happened. It's creepy now, but it wasn't back then.
• Sometimes ads go seriously wrong, often because they misjudge social circumstances (as if the Pakistani International Airlines ad were used more recently).
• A mild example would be the small controversy over the Sydney Sweeney ads for American Eagle jeans, which was released at the end of July.
• Here's the main 30-second version of the ad (there is a two-minute compilation of different versions of the ad available on youtube here).
• If you didn't hear about this ad, or have forgotten about the fuss it created in social networking, here's an article from the far-right New York Post pushing back against the complaints. 
• This ad got some criticism because the main joke in the ad, a pun in which the slogan "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans" refers to a common expression like "she has great genes", which usually means she is lucky in some way based on genetics: inherited beauty, fitness without working out, resistance to disease, longevity, etc. This could be thought of as a reference to eugenics, some kind of white supremacy advocacy, but the expression is quite common and not inherently harmful. It certainly isn't scientific, but so what? It's a pretty good joke, given that Sydney Sweeney can be quite beautiful and might be someone that we would envy for her appearance.
• Moreover, a version of the same joke has been used in earlier ads without attracting controversy. Here's an older example from the 1980s with the actress and model Brooke Shields modeling Calvin Klein jeans, and this one pushes the genes/jeans joke quite a bit further.
• On the other hand, Sydney Sweeney has blonde hair and blue eyes, which is closer to the Nazi/Aryan standard of beauty, so maybe it feels a bit edgier in that respect. It is worth noting that while Sydney Sweeney can look very beautiful and sexy, she isn't always that way. Here's how she looks in the 2023 movie "Reality", in which she plays a real-life National Security Agency contractor who leaked some confidential information relating to the 2016 presidential election and subsequently went to jail for doing that. I'd say that she looks pretty ordinary here. So maybe it isn't all in her genes!
• A really good example, which I think is a more serious miscalculation, is an Apple ad for the iPad Pro from last year, which is called "Crush".
• This ad, like all of Apple's work, is beautifully made and really sticks in the mind. Well, isn't that what advertising wants to do: to imprint itself on your consciousness and make you remember it any time it might be relevant to choices you make?
• But this ad really offended a lot of people and provoked a serious backlash on social media.
• There's a lot that could be said, but for me, one point is paramount: While Apple wanted to suggest that the new iPad Pro is a wonderful new digital tool for creative endeavors, and that would be a welcome message, it goes for it by demonstrating the destruction of a host of existing analog tools for the same purposes, along with the products of existing creative technology (toys and the like). In effect, they suggest that the iPad Pro will replace the older methods, instead of simply adding to them. That's offensive to people who have a lot of skill and expertise wrapped up in existing tools.
• Here's an excellent article summarizing the objections to this ad (the link to the New York Times is best, but here's a pdf in case you can't use the direct link).
• Within a week, Samsung, one of Apple's major competitors, had put out a response ad with the hashtag #Uncrush.
• Apple issued an apology saying they didn't mean the ad the way it is being interpreted, and promising not to run it on TV, but it hasn't been removed from their youtube channel, for example.
• I haven't even mentioned the plagiarism aspect of the ad, as it is virtually a more polished clone of a 2008 ad from another tech firm LG.
• I will mostly avoid showing videos in these lectures, as they don't play very well over Zoom, dropping frames and so forth. (I think they are basically okay though in the recordings of the lectures, which most of you will eventually default to watching instead of the live lecture.) Most of the videos we use in this course will be ads which we incorporate into the asynchronous bundle assignments.
• OK, that's it for tonight. Look at the bundles for this week as soon as you get a chance, and I hope you will find the ads amusing and interesting, and the assignments, well, if not exactly fun, at least not too annoying.