Advertisement
Larissa Silveira
Thaís Bernardes
Advertisement
is a form of
communication
intended
to
persuade an audience (viewers,
readers or listeners) to purchase or
take some action upon products,
ideals, or services. It includes the
name of a product or service and
how that product or service could
benefit the consumer, to persuade a
target market to purchase or to
consume that particular brand.
A Coca-Cola advertisement from the 1890s
Something about history...
Egyptians used papyrus
to make sales messages
and wall posters. Lost
and found advertising on
papyrus was common in
Ancient Greece and
Ancient Rome.
Edo period (division of Japanese history 1603-1868)
advertising flyer from 1806 for a traditional medicine
called Kinseitan.
Wall or rock painting for
commercial advertising is
another manifestation of
an ancient advertising
form, which is present to
this day in many parts of
Asia, Africa, and South
America.
History tells us that out-of-home advertising
and billboards are the oldest forms of advertising.
As the towns and cities of the
Middle Ages began to grow, and
the general populace was unable
to read, signs that today would
say cobbler, miller, tailor or
blacksmith would use an image
associated with their trade such
as a boot, a suit, a hat, a clock, a
diamond, a horse shoe, a candle
or even a bag of flour. Fruits and
vegetables were sold in the city
square from the backs of carts
and wagons and their proprietors
used street callers (town criers) to
announce their whereabouts for
the convenience of the customers.
In the 17th century
advertisements started to
appear in weekly newspapers
in England. These early print
advertisements were used
mainly to promote books and
newspapers, which became
increasingly affordable with
advances in the printing
press.
Printing press from 1811, exhibited in Munich, Germany
In June 1836, French
newspaper La Presse was
the first to include paid
advertising in its pages,
allowing it to lower its price,
extend its readership and
increase its profitability and
the formula was soon copied
by all titles.
N. W. Ayer & Son was the
first full-service agency to
assume responsibility for
advertising content. N.W.
Ayer opened in 1869, and
was located in Philadelphia.
Designed by N. W.
Ayer & Son
In the early 1920s, the first radio stations were established
by radio equipment manufacturers and retailers who offered
programs in order to sell more radios to consumers.
This practice was carried over to television in the late 1940s
and early 1950s.
The 1960s saw advertising transform into a modern
approach in which creativity was allowed to shine,
producing unexpected messages that made advertisements
more tempting to consumers' eyes.
The
Volkswagen
ad
campaign-featuring such
headlines
as
“Think
Small” —ushered in the
era of modern advertising
by promoting a "position"
or
"unique
selling
proposition" designed to
associate each brand with
a specific idea in the
reader or viewer's mind.
It was ranked as the best advertising campaign of the
20th century by Ad Age.
• The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the introduction of
cable television and particularly MTV.
• Marketing through the Internet opened new frontiers
for advertisers and contributed to the "dot-com" boom
of the 1990s.
• At the turn of the 21st century, a number of websites
including the search engine
, started a change
in online advertising by emphasizing contextually
relevant, unobtrusive ads intended to help, rather than
inundate, users.
ADVERTISEMENT: a mixed genre
Advertisements can be found anywhere: on the glossy pages of magazines, on the
gigantic hoardings across the street, on TV and on the Internet. The channel used
will obviously also affect the format or packaging of the advert and the structural
and linguistic choices. However, regardless of their medium and packaging, all
adverts - whether print ads, hoardings, commercials or banners – mix verbal and
visual elements.
Furthermore, ads often imitate other genres and masquerade as other kinds of text
– for example, a commercial may imitate a James Bond movie, an advert for a
brand of healthy food may incorporate a recipe.
Finally, also the register used in advertising is mixed as it conflates formal and
informal features, and blends characteristics of written and of spoken English. For
example, the sequence of adjectives and premodifiers points to a “writerly” style,
while syntactic choices may be more typical of a chatty register (Make a move! Go
and get it!).
Structure
A print advert is essentially made up of four elements which carry
out different functions:
• the headline attracts the reader’s attention;
• the body copy presents the product characteristics;
• the photograph or visual sets up a glamorous background;
• the slogan synthesises the product value and prompts its
purchase.
Graphology
Pictures are an essential
component of advertising as
they are meant to enhance the
objective
and
associative
qualities
of
products.
Besides
pictures,
also
graphology – i.e. the page
layout and visual aspect of
words – conveys connotative
meanings.
Lexical creativity
“Advertising promotes the new, by making use of a novel and almost
revolutionary ‘poetic diction’. New words in ads are very frequent and comply
with the rules of word formation”. (Trask 1997: 240)
• AFFIXATION: the process of obtaining words from other
words by adding affixes (prefixes and suffixes). Examples:
historical, prehistory derived from history.
• COMPOUNDING: the process of forming words by
combining two or more smaller words. Examples: teapot,
armchair, fairy-tale.
• BLENDING: the process of forming words by combining
pieces of other words. Examples: brunch (breakfast + lunch),
smog (smoke + fog).
Let’s try to discover the meaning of some
slogans:
Affixation
= Magnumyour
+ -ize: make
Magnumize
life.something more satisfactory by eating a Magnum icecream.
Affixation = un- + make-up: such light make-up
that it almost
feels unreal;
A fresh
un-makeup.
Blending
Diorbe
+ terrific:
Dior make-up is fabulous.
Dare= to
Diorific.
Compounding = traffic + stopping: beauty can have
unpredictable effects even
on traffic;
Traffic-stopping
lipstick.
Blending = essence + sensual: a sensual perfume;
Essensual perfume.
Compounding = headache + free:Headache-free
driving the right car needn’t
be a hassle.
motoring.
Register
•Advertising language adopts the syntactic structure
typical of spoken language with short, coordinate
sentences;
• Another distinctive characteristic of advertisements
which points again to spoken exchanges is the
frequency of orders and exclamations, ‘Buy!’,
‘Use!’, ‘Enjoy!’;
•Advertising is well-known for its crafted use of
linguistic and rhetorical devices to surprise and
entertain the public. The use of rhyme, alliteration
and metrical pattern may combine with metaphor
and hyperbole to make a promotional message sound
particularly impressive;
•In conclusion, advertising mixes features of an
informal, spoken register (syntactic choices) and of a
formal, elaborate style (lexical choices and rhetorical
figures).
LET’S
PRACTICE!!
References
Mixed
genre
advertisement.
Available
<http://www.federica.unina.it/scienze-politiche/lingua-inglesescpol/mixed-genre-advertisement/>. Access: August 23rd.
in:
WIKIPEDIA.
Advertising.
Available
in:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising>. Access: August 20th.
YOUTUBE. Available in: <http:// youtube.com>. Access: August
23rd.