I intend on writing my term paper on the similarities and differences within a group of women’s perfume ads. I have a collection of ten perfume ads for all different scents targeted towards females through women’s magazines. I found these ads in In Style, US Weekly and Cosmopolitan, all magazines which are read primarily by women.
These ads I found to all are sytagmatically set up similarly. They all feature beautiful women or celebrities photographed with a bottle of the perfume. They all show the bottle of perfume at the bottle of the page with the name above it. Most of the women in the ads are photographed in beautiful clothing or with no clothing.
I am a target consumer for these products, and I read women targeted magazines, and most of all I buy perfume. I have never considered why these perfumes ads are so effective. Also, while looking at all of these ten ads together I notice that they all look the same, they all have the same form. Could it be the set up of these ads which make them so effective? Are the ads with celebrities more effective than the ads with just ordinary models? I am determined to find the selling point within each ad and to prove that some perfume ads are more effective than others.
For my term paper, I'll be using four different, yet similar, Canadian
Suburban Ads called, "Trunk Monkeys." These video commercials run
about a
minute or so each, and they all advocate the same product, Suburban automobile
company. These ads have syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations (they chose a
monkey instead of say, an elephant and they all have the same suburban logo
at
the end), as well as a few of the codes listed by yourself and Chandler. For
instance, these ads use Monkeys as a "security system" for their vehicles.
This involves Social Codes (behavioural codes, bodily codes) Textual Codes
(narrartive- plot, action, character, setting, dialogue)and Interpretative
Codes (perceptual codes).
Topic Selection: #1 - Semiotic analysis of a series of related advertisements for the same product.
Proposal: The series of advertisements I have selected for this assignment are drawn from the relatively recent Spring/Nextel merger that resulted in the "most complete communications company" to date (according to the ad at least). The series of ads (I have 5 so far that work really well and 3 or 4 that are ok, but I am working on improving) promote the same product - "more choice" for the consumer from a telephone/mobile phone service - in very similar ways. The majority of these ads have been found in a series of 'News Week' magazines but also more recently in The goal of each ad is similar, and as a result, the most semiotically significant feature - the rhetorical trope of metaphor - is as well. In this series of ads, Sprint uses the metaphorical trope to express the familiar concept of movement/mobility (a key issue of today‚s telephone and wireless industry) in place of the unfamiliar concept of having "more choices."
The syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships of the various ads will also
be included as the ad warrants; possibly code discussion as well - I havn't
finished up my outline yet for this completely (that might be a little too much).
Idealy my dicussion of this ad series will basically be discussion of the ad
in terms of signs, paradigmatics and syntagmatics, rhetorical trope, and code
- blending to form a beautiful unison of thought and convey a message 'choice.'