C103 - The Semiotics of Advertising
Week 6 Lecture Notes
Monday 7/28/2025

For the rest of this week

• We have three bundles of asynchronous work and assignments for the week, all due as usual on Friday 8/1 at 11:59 pm.
• Bundle 16 Initial exploration of ideological codes in advertising
• Bundle 17 Explore something of the history of LGBTQ-associated advertisements and their growing acceptance over the past couple of decades
• Bundle 18 Explore political advertising, both historical and for the most recent midterm election season
• Don't forget that your term papers are also due on Friday night. Although you have already submitted proposals and presumably decided what you are going to do in the paper, the term paper info page might still be useful, especially if you get stuck while working on it. And if you need to consult with me, I generally respond quickly to emails. 
• If anybody has a serious and good reason why that deadline is a problem, please email me in advance of the deadline and I'll consider requests on a case-by-case basis. Please remember that my grades are due Monday evening, and if everybody asks for an extension on the term paper, I'll be in deep deep trouble.
• Just for fun, for anybody who is interested, I've also posted a Bundle 19 which is not a graded assignment. It includes a link to a career survey of my all-time favorite ad-maker Frank Budgen, who died in 2015. This is available for anybody who has gotten turned on to the idea of advertisements as potential works of art, and who might appreciate the body of work of a great artist in this field. If you look at them, I hope you will really enjoy them.

Comments on Homework and AI usage

• I really really appreciate it that you guys have almost completely avoiding substituting AI work for your own reactions to advertisements. I've had FAR less of this than in the past two regular academic year semesters. Thank you! Thank you! 
• Reading your homeworks has been a real pleasure this summer, and my comments on assignments I have graded so far (I'm still working on Bundle 10 as I speak this evening) have been a bit more extensive than has been my habit in the past. That's because many of you have stimulated me by saying interesting things about the ads. So I thank you for your contribution to what I hope has been a successful instantiation of this course. 
• I do regret having virtually no interaction with the majority of you in this online format, mostly asynchronous, aside from reading your bundle assignments (and soon your term papers!), so I don't know how most of you feel about the course, but I hope you'll eventually find that it provides you with some different ideas that might enrich your future studies and work. If this material is helpful to you in the future, I'll always appreciate it if you have a minute to drop me an email and tell me so. 

Codes (Chapter 4 of Chandler, 149-94)

• The general idea is, a code is a bundle of predispositions that you acquire by virtue of growing up and existing in our society. You learn how to think about all sorts of things, and then when you are presented with information (such as an ad), you filter that information through a code and interpret it in light of that code.
• A code is a complicated thing, and we can't itemize all the items any individual has in his code. But as fellow members of the same society, we share lots of learned bits of codes, and we learn to classify people in terms of how they agree or disagree with you in terms of their individual learned codes.
  • Bundle 16 starts out with some ads that seem to presuppose a code which fits women into a particular world-view, which could have been accepted even by the majority of women if you go back far enough.
  • Then the Nike ads in that bundle promote a particular attitude toward sports and its role in our lives, in effect expressing a kind of code about this aspect of our lives.
• Subsequently Chandler spends some time talking about various of these codes. Today I'll give some illustrations of how one kind of perceptual code works, namely, the distinction between figure and ground in visual image . This is something we learn as we grow up and get educated. It is by no means the only kind of perceptual code: for example, perspective in art is something that we have to learn to perceive and respond to; and there are many other things we could use as examples.
  • Perceptual codes
    • Figure vs. Ground
      • We tend to organize visual perception by picking out a figure, or foregrounded object, vs. a ground, or background
      • Color example (not ambiguous)
      • Classic example (from Chandler)
      • M.C. Escher's Moebius with Birds
      • Escher woodcut of birds
      • Another Escher bird drawing (doesn't this fellow get tired of this theme?)
      • "Four Klu Klux Klansmen looking down a well, seen from below"
      • Reversible W and A
    • Chandler points out that various factors contribute to our perception of figure/ground relations
      • Size (impact on vase)
      • Proximity
      • Similarity
      • Continuity
      • Closure
      • Symmetry
      • Surroundedness
    • Additional (not from Chandler):
      • Shape
      • Isolation
      • Centering (another example)
      • Orientation & pointing
  • Figure/ground in sound!
    • From Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, triplets of ascending notes
      • Alfred Brendel (triplets as figure)
      • Dubravka Tomashevich (triplets as ground, with bass line promoted to figure)
    • From Mozart's Don Giovanni
      • Piano version of ascending triplets by themselves (figure)
      • Opera version with midrange boosted (ground, but prominent)
      • Real opera version (ground, almost inaudible)

Manipulation in advertising

• Generally speaking, advertising seeks to persuade us (to buy a product, to adopt a particular opinion, etc.).
• But it is possible for advertisements to go too far and slip over a subtle line into manipulation.
• I define manipulation as taking advantage of psycho-social factors which eliminate the onlooker's agency in deciding what to think about the advertisement.
• A good example is what happens when the text of an advertisement evokes presupposition, which more or less compels the audience to assume the truth of the presupposed statement, as in this Apple Computer ad.
• So we want to distinguish between "persuasion" and "manipulation". Here's a brief summary of several differences:

• 	Persuasion	Manipulation
  	Legitimate purpose of advertising	Illegitimate purpose of advertising
  	Definition: "move by argument, entreaty, or expostulation to a belief, position, or course of action"	"to control or play upon by artful, unfair, or insidious means especially to one's own advantage"
  	Cooperative (in the sense of our expectations)	Uncooperative
  	Open, transparent	Indirect, camouflaging its real intentions

• Sex is obviously a strong tool for manipulation, because it is so vital to our lives. We've seen examples all through the semester, so I won't bother to take this up as if it were a new topic now.
• Not all manipulation has to be based on sex (and not all manipulation is necessarily bad either!)
  • Here are some other qualities that manipulation can be based upon:
    • Status and power
    • Patriotism
    • Beauty (closely related to sex, our old friend)
    • Fantasies of material success, family tranquility, happiness, and unrealistic levels of fun
    • There are also "darker" fantasies
      • Guilt
      • Fear
    • Ads involving children can be especially manipulative, given the feelings about kids that predominate in our society. Here is an astonishingly powerful and manipulative ad from Peru based on our protective feelings for children. 
    • And you'll see in Bundle 18 this week that political ads can be seriously manipulative.



• Bundles 16, 17, and 18 explore several areas in which codes come into play.
• In Bundle 16, we play with sexism and the ideology underlying many of Nike's ads ("sportism"?).
• In Bundle 17, we look at the history of LGBTQ-themed advertising. My thesis (not especially controversial) is that growing visibility of LGBTQ characters or personalities in mainstream advertising is effectively an index to growing social acceptance of LGBTQ people. In terms of codes, that means that the advertisers are not trying to market a controversial, oppositional code against a generally hostile audience.
• Bundle 18 explores a few political ads, mostly in historical terms. Here there is almost always an oppositional code effect: whether it is the Republicans or the Democrats, the ads are usually aimed to chip away at the opposition, to overcome a contrary ideological code (or sway a wishy-washy voter), although there can be confirmation ads which aim to encourage or retain the base of existing supporters. Many of these ads are manipulative of the viewer, or unfair in pushing some emotional buttons that have little or nothing to do with the substance of the electoral race. We will explore manipulation as opposed to persuasion as one topic net Monday in the final lecture for the course; there are a couple of bundle questions that ask you about how manipulative you perceive an ad to be, but just answer these on the basis of common sense and your natural instincts. I have deliberately not provided any advertising from the 2024 elections, as I consider they are still too close to us emotionally, and feelings are still rather intense about that election campaign.

A few conclusions for this course

• This has been a really quick and not very deep introduction to the concepts, methods, and terminology of semiotics, illustrated mainly through the analysis of advertising texts.
• It's just a 100-level course, and I don't expect anybody to come out of this short course with an expert understanding of semiotics.
• For that matter, I'm not an trained professional in it myself. My academic field is linguistics, and I'd call myself a "fellow traveler" in semiotics, someone whose concerns are along the same lines, but not precisely in that area.
• I suggested once before that if you can include some accurately used semiotic concepts and terms in a paper in another class, especially in the humanities or social sciences, you will have a great shot at impressing the professor, who probably has a limited idea of what semiotics is really about.
• Every semester I get two or three emails from students who took this course in the last 15-20 years telling me, well, I never thought I'd have any use for this stuff, but lo and behold, I was able to use it for XYZ. That is extremely gratifying to me when that happens.
• To summarize, I'll suggest two ways you might use this course in the future.
  • First, consider integrating some aspects of semiotic methodology into papers you write in other classes.
  • And second, if you are trying to figure out something confusing, but it perplexes you when you think about it directly, trying doing a little semiotic deconstruction by breaking it down into constituent signs, considering their paradigmatics and syntagmatics, and so forth. For this purpose, the two outlines provided in the term paper info page can be very useful.