Semiotic analysis of advertising

... The semiotic analysis of advertising assumes that their creators design the meanings of advertisements. As well as just asking us to buy something, Williamson argues that advertisements ask us to participate in ideological ways of seeing the world and ourselves. Advertisements make use of signs, codes, and social myths that are already in circulation, and ask us to recognise and often to enjoy them. While reading and decoding the signs in advertisements, we participate in the structures of meaning that advertisements use to represent advertised product, society, and us. The first step in analysing an advertisement is to note the various signs - those things that carry a meaning - in the advertisement itself. At first sight, most of these signs simply seem to denote the things or people which the images represent, or to denote the referents of the linguistic signs. However, the signs in advertisements rarely just denote

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