Semiotic Analysis Essay
Of a print advertisement
Emelie Johansson
CIU210
SAE Dubai Institute
Media’s central role in our modern society, have become a sort of reference to how we make sense of our existence's and the world we are living in. Advertising companies are selling themselves in the best way possible through their marketing and are apart of the distorted picture we have of what’s real and normal. Even though we know how advertising tries to affect us, and we try not to believe it, we are being “manipulated” by the advertising we are exposed to.
Melanie Dempsey and Andrew Mitchel did a study for the magazine ”journal of Consumer research” to show how much advertising really affect us without our knowledge.
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In the other group 70-80 percent picked the brand that was associated with positive items. This shows that even though we known that a product have better properties the powerful tools of advertising can make us chose something else. Art Markman a cognitive scientist believe that we choose things that makes us feel good, but we should be more careful with what we are being exposed to. Because most of the times we don’t even realize that advertisement affect us mentally with out us noticing (Markman, 2010).
The purpose of this paper is to make a semiotic analysis of a print advertisement to raise awareness of how we can be more critical to media and how we portray genders. According to Julia T. Wood who works with communication there are three main themes that the media use when they represent gender. First, men and women are portrayed in stereotypical ways. Second, women are underrepresented. The third way is how the media portray the relationship between men and women with traditional gender roles and the normalization of violence against
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The picture clearly shows the man being dominance over the female, through the way he is positioned over her and looking down at her with an angry face expression. The way his body is positioned on the chair makes him look like an animal looking down at its prey. He is also the biggest figure in the image, and he takes up more space. “A classic stereotype of deference is that of lowering oneself physically in some form or other of prostration.” Says (Dillion, 2008), again the man is being portrayed as the one with