C103 - The Semiotics of Advertising
Week 15 Lecture Notes
Monday 12/8/2025

For the rest of this week

• We have three bundles of asynchronous work and assignments for the week, all of them due as usual on Friday 12/12 at 11:59 pm.
• Bundle 19 Connotation, denotation, and myth
• Bundle 20 Grice's maxims as applied in advertising
• Bundle 21 Manipulative advertising
• Just for fun (!) for anyone who has enjoyed the advertisements you've been exposed to in this course, here's Bundle 22: a page of ads by my all-time favorite ad-maker Frank Budgen, who died in 2015. No graded assignment here, just a bunch of great ads, some of which you have already seen in previous bundles.
• Recall that your term papers are due on Thursday 12/18, the Thursday of finals week
• Some of you may want to revisit the term paper info page.
  • In particular, at the end of that information page there are some questions that can help you organize your thinking in semiotic terms when approaching a relatively open-ended assignment like this term paper.
• And if you want to view what I said about the term papers in the Week 12 lecture, you can find the video of that lecture in the Week 12 Materials announcement. The term paper is discussed near the end.
• Because we have been struggling against AI usage this semester, and it is SUCH a big problem for a mainly asynchronous online course like this one, I'd really like to hear from people who have either experimented with having AI do the bundle assignments for them, or have used it regularly. If you have any advice for me how I can discourage this, aside from punishing people with zeros on assignments when we are convinced that they are using AI, or warning them when we think they are; or in the worst case, for repeat offenders, submitting academic misconduct reports to the university, PLEASE give it to me. You could email me after the semester is over if you are worried that it might affect your grade or go on line and add a comment to the course evaluation questionnaire. I won't see those responses until after grades have been submitted (they are due the Monday after finals week).
• I meant to an AI-specific question to the OCQ questionnaires, but I forgot to try to do it until the deadline for customizing the questionnaires had passed. But you would be welcome and encouraged to drop a comment into any of the three standard text questions included in all OCQ questionnaires. If you don't bother with those course evaluation questionnaires, you could also just email me if you want to say anthing about this. I've already received one very helpful suggestion from a student in this course.
• I am retiring from IU as of the end of December. This course is scheduled to be offered next semester, and if they want me to teach it, I'm willing to do so. They would have to pay me extra to do it, since I won't be getting my regular salary, and they might well decide not to. If the course is given again in the spring, any suggestions for preventing people from resorting to AI would be welcome. Otherwise you can think of this request as a thought experiment.

Connotation, denotation, and myth

• There is a lot being crammed into this final lecture in our already compressed 2nd 8 week course, so I've set up Bundle 19 based on the concepts of connotation, denotation, and myth to be relatively independent and based on what is included in Bundle 19.
• This bundle is based upon material covered at the end of Chapter 5 in the Chandler textbook, roughly pages 199-210, so it might behoove you to go back and read or reread those pages for this bundle.
• Bundle 19 is a little longer than most of the other bundles in this course, because it asks you to watch some extended film clips, so you might plan to leave a couple of hours to deal with it comfortably.

Grice's maxims of conversational behavior

• There were two short pdf readings for this material
  • Grice and Pragmatics
    
  • Grice in Advertisements — It’s a Pretty Big Deal
  • I strongly recommend that you read these, if you haven't already, before tackling Bundle 20.
• Paul Grice was a philosopher who in 1975 published a highly influential paper outlining his "cooperative principle" of human spoken interaction ("Logic and conversation", 1975, Syntax & Semantics, v. 3), which he broke down into four "maxims" governing conversation.
• Background info #1: Relevance
  • Consider the following sentence:
    • It's raining.
  • What does this mean?
  • What does a person mean to communicate when s/he says it?
  • Key: you usually say things that are relevant to a situation, and therefore the reason for saying them, and the ultimate message you mean to communicate, depends heavily upon the shared knowledge of the relevant context for the actual words.
• Background info #2: Presupposition
  • We may state a piece of information: You are a lazy bum.
    • This has truth value: it may be either true or false.
  • But we may also presuppose it: I'm so sorry you are a lazy bum.
  • But embedded in this frame, the proposition "you are a lazy bum" has no truth value; it is presupposed (or automatically assumed) to be true, whether it is true or not.
  • This is like some classic joke lines:
    • Have you quit beating your wife? (or: Are you still whipping your son every week?)
    • He called her a Republican, and then she insulted him right back.
  • Note that this doesn't always happen. Note the difference between the examples below.
    • These include presupposition
      • It's your fault that you are a lazy bum.
      • It's not your fault that you are a lazy bum.
    • But these do not:
      • It's your belief that you are a lazy bum.
      • It's not your belief that you are a lazy bum.
    • Presuppositions are not affected by negating the frame for them.
    • Because of this, if you then go on to contradict the presupposition, you get nonsense
      • It's your fault that you are a lazy bum, but in fact you are not a lazy bum.[NONSENSE]
      • It's your belief that you are a lazy bum, but in fact you are not a lazy bum. [OK]

Ads of course may exploit these two principles of relevance and presupposition

• Here are two ads that illustrate presupposition
  • Apple Computers
  • Herbal Essences
• Now let's consider Grice's maxims of conversational behavior
  • These maxims summarize our tacit "contract" when we participate in a conversation or other discourse situation
  • Speakers (generally) abide by these principles
  • Listeners expect them from the speaker
  • All of this happens on a subconscious level
    • But when one of these maxims is violated, we notice it and intuitively understand what the other person means anyway, due to our deep-rooted acceptance of these principles.
• Grice's general Cooperative Principle:

  Make your contribution [to a conversation] what is expected of you, at the point in the conversation when you make it, in keeping with the purpose or direction of the conversation you are having.

• This can be broken up into 4 maxims or specific practices of conversation, as outlined by Grice in his seminal paper.

1. Maxim of Quality (make your contribution a true one, i.e. ...):
   1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
   2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
2. Maxim of Relevance:
   1. Be relevant.
3. Maxim of Quantity:
   1. Make your contribution as informative as is required.
   2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
4. Maxim of Manner (be perspicuous):
   1. Avoid obscurity of expression.
   2. Avoid ambiguity.
   3. Be brief.
   4. Be orderly.
5. Maxims of Politeness (George Lakoff, adding to Grice):
   1. Avoid imposing.
   2. Make the hearer feel good.
   3. Give the hearer options.

• This 5th maxim is not relevant to advertising, but I like it as an addition to the set, so I wanted to at least mention it to you briefly. Bundle 24 concentrates on Grice's four maxims.
• These principles guide our production of any utterance, and we do not normally violate them indisciminately (a better term is to "flout" the maxims, or willfully disregard them in speaking)
  • We can flout (1) the Maxim of Quality:

    A: Where is Professor Fowler's office?
    B: Woodburn 218.

  • We can flout (2) the Maxim of Relevance:

    A: Where is Professor Fowler's office?
    B: I think I'll go to Dagwood's for lunch today.

  • We can flout (3) the Maxim of Quantity:

    A: Where is Professor Fowler's office?
    B: GISB 4034. You take the elevator to the fourth floor, turn right (and make good and sure you don't turn left, or else you could wind up at the SGIS dean's office. Scary people over there). Anyway, note that you have to be in the east wing of the building, not the west wing. The west wing doesn't even have a fourth floor! Go down the hall and Fowler's office will eventually turn up on the right. He has a double-sized office (boy, isn't he an important fellow!), but they only just gave him the promised furniture for that office after he's been there 9 years! [...]

  • We can flout (4) the Maxim of Manner:

    A: Where is Professor Fowler's office?
    B: Latitude 39.1699094 degrees, longitude -86.5172505 degrees, 804 feet above sea level, door faces 4 degrees south of due east.
    A: Thanks a bunch, I'll go right there. Just let me get out my GPS device.

  • We can flout (5) the Maxim of Politeness:

    A: Where is Professor Fowler's office?
    B: Any idiot knows that

• Statements lead to implicatures based on these maxims.
  • Maxim of Quality
    • John is taking C103 for the third time this semester.
    • Implicates: John really is doing this, and I know it for a fact (I personally vouch for the information)
  • Maxim of Relevance
    • What time is it? Well, I heard the mailman just now.
    • Implicates: Whatever time the mailman usually comes, it must be about that time now.
  • Maxim of Quantity
    • What happened to Mortimer in court the other day? Oh, he had to pay a fine.
    • Implicates: He didn't get any more severe punishment (say, life imprisonment).
  • Maxim of Manner
    • What did Alfred do this morning?
      • 1) He went to the store and bought some beer. vs.
      • 2) He bought some beer and went to the store. ??
      • (1) Implicates: Alfred went first to the store and only then bought beer. (cf. sub-maxim "be orderly")
      • (2) Implicates: Alfred first bought beer and then went to some other store for some other purpose.
  • These implicatures help drive rhetorical tropes.
    • John is a pig.
    • We know John isn't literally a pig.
    • But the statement must be relevant to John (Maxim of Relevance).
    • Therefore we look at how "pig" is relevant to John and try to make that fit what we know about John.
  • Generally, it is our tacit acceptance of these maxims which makes rhetorical tropes work.
  • We look for a way to interpret what we've heard or read when the initial literal reading fails.
  • And rhetorical tropes are powerful tools for communication, since we as listeners/onlookers have to synthesize the intended meaning.
  • Any time you put extra effort into "getting" something, it's impact is greater, and you are more likely to retain it.
  • The second of the graded bundles for this week, Bundle 20, presents you with some ads that exploit the concepts we've been talking about here to make their ads more compelling, sometimes sliding over the line into manipulation.

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 the Apple Computer ad cited earlier.
• 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 Grice)	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. But let's see some of the most remarkable sex-oriented ads I've ever encountered.
  • Coco de Mer print ads ("How does yours feel?") 1 2
  • Coco de Mer TV ad (?!)
  • Trojan ads which slavishly imitate Coco de Mer, without the real orgasms: 1 2
  • Compare Aura Rosenberg's artistic photos of men having orgasms
• Not all manipulation has to be based on sex (and it's not all 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. There are some powerful examples in this week's last bundle, so I won't go any further here.
    • And we've seen a week or two ago how political ads can be seriously manipulative.
• Bundle 21 asks you to distinguish between manipulative and persuasive ads. 

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.


• You have another ten days until the term papers are due. Try to write a good one, as I do appreciate students who put some real effort into that. AND STAY AWAY FROM AI!! Don't hesitate to contact me if you need to ask a question about the term paper, and I'll try to answer promptly. Email is best for that purpose.