proiect advertising

7/31/2019 Proiect Advertising

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completely reverses the traditionally commonly accepted attributes of Nature.Out of the four variants of manipulating the ideology of the natural in advertisinginvestigated by Vestergaard and Schroder, I will only pinpoint the second one asbeing highlighted by “Iams”.

“Iams” improves nature and although the dog is small, thin and weak, it

will assume the same characteristics as a big, strong and stout dog. Thetransformation will only be possible if the dog consumes “Iams” which has thepower to transform a small dog into a super dog. “Iams” comes to support andreassure dog owners or lovers who would never wish or dream of leaving theirmost precious “possession” unprotected in the face of dangers. If we take intoconsideration the long working hours from work, the fact that pets are left bythemselves with virtually no companion except for maybe another pet andnatural disasters or potentially harmful situations or incidents can arise at everymoment, then we may begin to understand that “Iams” operates on theidentification between pet and pet owner. By strengthening the pet’s defensesystem, the pet owner’s own system of defense and self-confidence will become

stronger. A tentative characterization of ads as discourse types

Defining discourse as “text and context together interacting in a waywhich is perceived meaningful and unified by the participants”, Cook structuresthe discourse of advertising, along three main coordinates. These are theanalysis of the materials of ads, the analysis of the text of ads and the analysisof the participants in advertising. The characteristic features of ads thus becomeprototypical and advertising discourse can’t be set in conjunction with literarydiscourses.

Analyzing the materials that “Iams” makes use of, it can be stated that itdoesn’t contain any musical content or speech. The picture envisages a small dogwho is the embodiment of strength and courage keeping a perfectly still andunflinching position, the same that dogs are supposed to preserve during, forexample, in a dog competition or show. The text of the ad creatively andeloquently uses paralanguage to send the message towards thereceiver/addressee. “BIG” is in opposition with “helps small dogs act” to reflectthe state of small dogs before using the product and the transformation theyundergo after using the same product. The word emphasized is “BIG” becauseonce dogs use “Iams”, everything they do will be characterized by this word.Size will actually be overlooked because the dogs’ actions will speak for

themselves.The participants in the ad are the addresser, which is the dog food

company itself trying to persuade the consumer of the best quality and the besteffects of its product namely, “Iams” whereas the addressee is firstly the petowner and only secondly the pet itself. At the level of the text, the ad doesn’trequire a high percentage of intertextuality from the addressee’s part tounderstand the message that is being sent. The wide views connected to thecharacter and features of a small dog as well as its obvious drawbacks or

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shortcomings when it comes to deal with extreme situations, is the onlyinformation the addressee needs to get a clear image of the advertisingintention. The typeface and the somewhat figurative language – “act BIG” – canbear two significances, are also indicative of the purpose behind the campaignpromoting dog food.

A tentative classification of advertisements

In his book, The Discourse of Advertising Guy Cook determines a fewcriterial features for categorizing ads. The first is the medium in which an adappears and which determines a difference in modes of communication. “Iams”is an ad intended for either a magazine or the Internet and this is reason why thepicture and the text are the modes of communication which matter and standout the most. In terms of product or service, advertising employs differenttechniques and strategies. The product advertised in “Iams” is dog food, whichdetermines the image of the product to be a dog and more precisely, a small

one, since the target of the ad is the small, defenseless, very sensitive and very“child-like” dog.Technique is a criterion distinguishing hard sell advertising and soft sell

advertising on the one hand, and the so-called reason-ads from tickle ads on theother hand. “Iams” is a representative of soft sell advertising because it relies onthe implication that a dog’s capacities will improve and consequently its ownerlife will become easier and his/her image will gain prestige. From thisperspective, the image of the dog owner is associated with that the owned pet inthe sense that the dog’s qualities or drawbacks are projected upon the ownerhimself and vice versa.

Moreover, “Iams” is a tickle ad since it touches the cords of humour, irony

and emotion. If one looks at the image for the ad, one can’t help feel sorry orworried about the “poor” animal who is faced with most difficult situation.However, reading the text will trigger a relieving feeling that the dog is indeedfine and that he has actually been specially prepared or “trained” for thisexperience through his nourishment with a special, “magic-like” dog food.

The impact of the ad is achieved at two levels: the ironic and the literal.At the ironic level, the ad can be interpreted as only offering small dogs theability to “pose” as courageous and pretend to be “big” – a reality which theconsumers of the ad don’t have any doubts about. The ironic meaning suggestsmake-belief aspirations or wishful thinking. At the literal level, however, themeaning implied is that of performing in a impressive and flawless way. The key

terms in understanding the ironic and literal layers of reading are “act” and“big”.

Visual conceptual metaphor in advertising

In what follows, I intend to apply Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of metaphorto visual communication in advertising. Although traditional views on metaphorplace conceptual metaphors in the “extra-ordinary” sphere of language, these

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are contemporarily regarded as highly conventional and unconsciously used.Metaphors can either manifest themselves in language or in visualcommunication.

Moreover, the metaphorical mappings that structure the discourse of advertising demonstrate the (sub) literary status of this discourse type.

Advertising works by suspending “reality” conventions and instating its ownaesthetic conventions, among which metaphorical processes underlying itsdiscourse are primarily important.

Visual metaphors preserve their “classical” attributes, which consist ininnovative and unexpected elements as well as highly elaborated andresplendent descriptions. However, they do represent a manifestation in thevisual mode of conceptual, cognitive metaphors, which structure our existenceand the way we perceive it.

According to Forceville, pictorial metaphors in advertising can be dividedinto several classes: metaphors with one pictorially present term, metaphorswith two pictorially present terms, verbo-pictorial metapahors and pictorial

similes. “Iams” can be grouped under the verbo-pictorial metaphors sectiongiven that one of the terms is rendered pictorially – the small dog belonging tothe Chinese Crested breed defying all challenges victoriously facing alldifficulties – and the other one verbally – the body copy: “Helps small dogs actBIG”.

Lakoff and Johnson identify the first category of conceptual metaphors asbeing structural. These metaphorically depict one concept in terms of another.The image text of the “Iams” ad is structured in terms of the COURAGE IS ANINNER FORCE AND FOOD IS AN INCENTIVE FOR/A PROVIDER OF RESILIANCE ANDGRANDEUR metaphors. If all the components of the verbal text had beenomitted, this reading of the image would have still been possible. The body-copy

“Iams - Helps small dogs act BIG” reinforces the visual metaphor and provides itsverbal translation.The verbal text contains two verbs in a Present Tense Simple form –

“helps” and “act”, whereas the image lacks one. The same thing can noticed asfar as the indices of place and the person deixis are concerned: the imagedoesn’t entail any, while the verbal text supplies the necessary categories of identity – “small dogs” and spatial location – “in any circumstance”. Thelinguistic message anchors the visual discourse, enabling and guiding theidentification and interpretation of the pictorial elements. The image isn’tanchored in reality but is turned into an interpretable entity by the text whichsupplies the link between the image and the situation in time and space – which

can’t be established exclusively through visualization.Kress and Van Leeuwen(1996) propose a framework according to which

language and images both realize meaning via specific forms. From theirperspective, visual communication needs anchoring by a verbal text to reach adefinite meaning. They introduce the concept of visual grammar, whichdescribes the way in which visual components combine in visual meaningfultexts. Visual communication makes use of an inventory of compositional

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structures to fulfill the three major functions of nay communication mode: theideational, the interpersonal and the textual functions.

The visual text is affected by layout and, in the case of “Iams”, thepicture follows the standard conventions of depiction, being positioned in thecentre of the page. Moreover, we notice the split between the top (image) and

bottom (verbal text) reflecting the split between ideal and real or before andafter. The brand name and the product that are advertised appear in the lowerright corner, a feature which facilitates conveying the belief that a certainbehaviour and character aren’t “ideally” thought of anymore, but are actuallyreal and tangible.

Furthermore, the verbal text also performs a relaying function since itcontains crucial information that isn’t present in the image. If no information orclues had been offered, we may have been inclined to think that the dog iseither subjected to animal cruelty or that he is part of a strange experiment.Language and image are in a complementary distribution, each contributing itsown part to the overall message.

Along the same lines, McQuarrie and Mick – in On Resonance: A CriticalPluralistic Advertising Rhetoric – subdivided advertisements into two basiccategories: resonant and non-resonant. In their view, print ads are resonantwhen they combine wordplay with a relevant picture so as to create ambiguityand incongruity. “Iams” plays upon the words “act big” and it also introduces arelevant pictorial with the purpose of creating ambiguity and incongruity. Metaphor and schema refreshing in advertising

In Vestergaard and Schroder’s definition, the “recuperative” and“reformed” ads are stereotype and ideology disruptive. An analysis of the text

worlds projected by an increasing number of schema-refreshing ads mirrors astrong tendency of progressive deconstruction of ideologised clichés.Nonetheless, Cook’s view is that advertisements aren’t literary because

they don’t display discourse deviation. While literary discourse is perceived asschema-disrupting and refreshing, advertising discourse is described as schemareinforcing or schema adding. Guy Cook’s approach to schema theory redefines“literariness” in close connection with the ability to create conditions forschema change. As he points out, literariness can be adequately defined only inrelation to the interaction between the language of texts and the reader’s priorknowledge. The necessary and sufficient conditions for identifying literarinessare met when deviations at the level of language and text (text schemata)

challenge/disrupt readers’ prior schemata and result in schema refreshment.Even though there are indeed many advertisements which comply with

Cook’s view, there is enough empirical evidence to support the reduction of schema reinforcing and stereotypical advertisements. According to Lakoff andJohnson, metaphors play a major role in organizing our conceptual systems. Thereader’s perception of a text-world instantiated by the discourse of advertisingwill thus crucially depend on metaphors that either connect already existingschemata or create new ones.

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From Semino’s perspective, schema-reinforcing conventional metaphorsmay be regarded as including Lakoff and Johnson’s orientational and ontologicalmetaphors, as well as conventional, commonly accepted structural metaphorslike ARGUMENT IS WAR, LIFE IS A JOURNEY or PEOPLE ARE PLANTS. Basicmetaphors reflect, reiterate and reinforce the readers’ background information,

whereas innovative metaphors lead to a (partial) restructuring of the domain of the primary subject and are likely to refresh the readers’ backgroundinformation.

The “Iams” ad can be considered to be schema-refreshing and innovative.It contains an elaborated structural metaphor – FOOD IS A PROVIDEROF/INCENTIVE FOR COURAGE AND STRENGTH - which is based on a conventionalstructural metaphor – FOOD IS AFFECTION, CARE, PROTECTION AND LOVE (in thedomain of pet nurturing). Even though a product –food- is equated with abstractqualities namely, courage, pride and endurance, the metaphor prompts arefreshing attitude towards the way small dogs are perceived by their owners.Most ads promoting dog food always stress the idea that we should offer our pets

the best care and nourishment. The message underlying this idea is that wecontrol the way our pets develop and grow and they mainly depend on us.“Iams” perceives the owners’ interference in the dog’s nourishment process as apositive factor but removes dogs from their familiar background and introducesthem into a new one: one of self-reliance and hardship, where owners aremissing and where it all depends on how well dogs are nurtured and how theyare trained to handle themselves.

Parody in advertising

Through the investigation of parody and irony, advertising has come to be

coined a (sub) literary discourse. Advertising parodies not only whatcontemporary society deems to be important issues, but also the conventions of its own genre.

Firstly, the ad for “Iams” deconstructs the generally accepted andembraced view that small, fragile dogs should be pampered and spoiled. Instead,it introduces a new perspective on the upbringing and treatment of small dogs:although they should be provided with the best food and the best care, a specialtype of food and care is most necessary and adequate namely, one that doesn’tsmother but actually enables them to withstand difficult and troublesomesituations.

Secondly, it deconstructs the generally portraying of dogs in dog food ads.

In standard dog food ads, dogs are happy playing along with their masters or withtheir toys or are sad and down until they are given their favourite type of food.The dogs aren’t taken out of their familiar background which is their house ortheir playing grounds from the backyard and moreover, they are only expectedto carry out very simple tasks, if any at all. In “Iams” however, the dogs’ friendlyenvironment is decontextualized and recontextualized. The dog is faced with avery dangerous and potentially harmful situation and he is supposed to perform

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at its best. He isn’t only supposed to play a nice companion, but a survivor and afighter.

Irony is nonetheless directed at the small dog itself through the verbaltext. The verbal text can be interpreted in two ways. The dog can either try toimpress and act big as its breed doesn’t normally allow him to and as it is

continually opposed to a stronger and more developed breed, or it can actuallysurprise everyone by exceeding expectations and achieving great things.The perspective employed is an innovative one since it employs irony and

it looks at very small dog breeds as fighters and winners and not as inborn“losers” and vulnerable creatures as they are generally assumed to be. The addoesn’t underestimate small, defenseless dogs but what it actually does isoverestimate them.

Images as signs. Iconic, indexical, symbolic images

If in semiotics, words are signs – physical forms (signifiers) - carrying

meanings (signifieds), images in advertising can, by analogy, be seen as signstoo. To realize meanings (signifieds), images employ physical from – colour,perspective, line – signifiers in what may be called an arbitrary unmotivatedrelation.

Peirce distinguishes three types of relations between a sign and itsreferent: the iconic, the indexical and the symbolic. Vestergaard and Schroderdescribe the iconic relation as one of likeness, of objective similarity. Visualcommunication relies on iconic images, which actually constitute the simplestform of advertising illustration: a picture of the product against a neutralbackground. “Iams” employs the iconic image in the lower, right corner, which isprojected upon a neutral background made up of grey and white.

The indexical sign can be used to represent am object entity because itusually occurs in close association with it. The small dog in “Iams” stands for themajority of small dog breeds in the same way as the paw stands for all dogs ingeneral and the barrel of wine stands for massive dog breeds.

A symbol isn’t present by itself in the visual image of “Iams” in the sameway as advertising doesn’t usually rely only on symbols in its visualrepresentations. There isn’t any symbol that could make the clear distinctionbetween different types or brands of dog food because these usually adoptmetonymic elements – images of dogs or different parts of their bodies like theirpaws, ears or faces – which they join to their brand names to promote theircampaigns. By comparison, there are plenty of symbols used to represent

different but very acknowledged brands of cars.

Advertising as rhetoric practice

In order to make their slogans “stick”, advertisers rely on foregrounding,either by means of parallelism or deviation from the norms of ordinary language.Edward McQuarrie and David Mick make up an inventory of rhetoric figures inlanguage: repetition, reversal, substitution and destabilization. In if “Iams”,

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repetition isn’t emphasized by any figures, substitution is revealed through theuse of metonymy – the paw which symbolizes a part of the dog’s body-, reversalthrough the use of antithesis – “small” opposes “big” and finally, destabilizationthrough the use of irony.

Deviations can also occur at the syntactic level of the visual discourse,

resulting in a foregrounding of a vertical axis structuring the message of the ad.The foregrounded element in the body-copy of “Iams” as well as the logo of thedog food brand are placed on a vertical dimension enabling the other elementsof the body-copy to align themselves to the same virtual perspective and thusleading towards an overall preferred reading. The vertical axis structuring boththe verbal and pictorial components of the ad is indicative of the basicorientational metaphor PRIDE/COURAGE/STRENGTH IS UP.

The product itself, which is iconically represented at the bottom of theimage, represents the first step taken to achieve these qualities. Even thoughthe foregrounded element from the body-copy is placed last on the vertical axis,it stands for dogs of small sizes and their initial humble or low vertical status and

tends to imply that even the smallest dogs can reach a higher vertical state orposition by consuming this product. As it follows, small isn’t intrinsically smallbut actually intrinsically big and acting big simply needs a incentive or stimulusto surface and reveal itself. The verbal ad sends the message that a dog can be“big from where it stands” but by consuming the product and by growing“inside” it will of course create the impression that he has also grown on avertical axis in real dimensions, an interpretation which is underlined by thevisual image of the ad.

Finally, the ad for “Iams” can supply many sources for teachingmaterials. It can first of all be chosen to highlight the concepts of visual andverbal metaphors. Moreover, the teaching of different types of metaphors –

structural, orientational and ontological - can be introduced and advanced byusing ads as illustrations or examples. Secondly, since the ad represents a verygood example of irony, students can become familiarized with this notion as wellas with different types of irony or the notions of parody and humour. Thirdly,students can study rhetoric devices through the analysis of this ad. They canafterwards apply their recently acquired knowledge and information aboutrhetoric and rhetoric elements to the study of poetry and literature.

Fourthly, the ad can be employed to reflect the wide range of conceptsand elements characterizing and belonging to the study of advertising. As it hasbecome clear throughout the analysis of this particular “Iams” ad, there havebeen many theories, features and definitions issued forth by many researchers

specialized in many domains, which can either be directly applied or lead toequivalents or correspondences between advertising and other differentdomains. This remark thus provides the fifth reason why advertising can turn outto be a useful teaching material. It is a more accessible method to promote andcontinue the study of more difficult and intricate domains like linguistics,pragmatics, literature, psychology, sociology and even economy.

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