Lilly Neville
Popular Culture Textual Analysis
For my popular culture textual analysis, I have decided to do a semiotic analysis of an advertisement for Budweiser beer. This advertisement features United States Olympic track and field athlete Brianna Glenn posing in a red bikini next to an enlarged bottle of Budweiser beer. I was able to break down this advertisement into the aspects of a semiotic analysis: signifier, signified, denotation, connotation and cultural code, in order to discover the cultural effect this advertisement had on it’s audience. This advertisement uses visual techniques in order to attract a certain audience and gain popularity and customers. These visual techniques could also be seen as stereotypes that refer to specific physical traits and gender roles that are able to, according to Walter Lippmmann, “paint pictures on our heads.”
The 2008 Budweiser ad featuring Olympic athlete Brianna Glenn uses many visual aspects that trigger our own mental representation and allow us to create our own thoughts and ideas about the idea at hand. First of all, Glenn is dressed in nothing but a small red bikini and tall red stilettos. This not only downgrades the female gender into the idea that women are nothing but sexual icons that attract men, but also gives young women the idea that if they consume this product, they will look like or end up like Brianna Glenn. The signifier of this ad includes both images and text. The images being a woman in a bikini,