An Analytical Reading. Illustrate your essay with specific examples.

In essence, any advertisement is an attempt by a specific company to make people buy their products. Although this is their main function, they do much more. They create a desire for the product by fixing a cultural meaning to it. Advertisements reflect the society we live in by implying meanings that are attached to certain signs. They also reify these meanings and thus not only reflect society, but also produce social meaning.
In this brief, I would display this process by analyzing the attached Symantec advert. Thwaites et al. (2002) have proposed functions of signification as tools for identifying the meanings that signs can produce. By analyzing the advertisement with these functions, we can see how advertisements not only suggest but also produce social meaning.
Firstly let us look at the advertisement. We can see a photograph of a scene where a teenage girl is using a keyboard and a woman is reading a newspaper that says “Stalkers could use the Internet to contact your children” on its front page followed by Symantec logo. By looking at it, it is clear that this is an advertisement by the way it is formatted: the large size of the photograph, a company logo and a list of products they offer. We can say that by doing the above, the signs are performing referential and formal functions. The next questions to ask is what should we understand from the image or in other words, what are the metalingual functions of the signs?
Let us look at the text written in the advertisement. It is written in the style newspapers have on the front page, big capital letters that lead us to assume what is the most important. In the advertisement the biggest words are STALKERS and CHILDREN. If we pay a little more attention, we can see “STALKERS contact your CHILDREN” and only with some more concentration we see the whole sentence of “STALKERS could use the Internet to contact your CHILDREN.” This kind of design of the advertisement reminds the reader of other similar titles that usually are on the covers of newspapers to shock, warn and tell about terrible events that have taken place. Also, by the signs in the picture we are able to decide about the situation. The woman is sitting on a sofa that allows us to guess it is a living room. The girl is using a keyboard, a piece of equipment usually belonging to a computer. Also the Internet is mentioned in the text – that tells us that we should assume that the girl is using the Internet. What should also be noted is what is omitted. We cannot see the computer screen, thus we do not know what the girl is looking at. The woman cannot see the girl either, because she is reading a newspaper. She is not reading the warning written on the first page either. She has been careless enough not to notice it.
Above, we have discussed the message and what meanings does it produce. Next, let us think about the addresser and addressee of the message and the relationship between them. As it was noted before, the text is positioned in a newspaper. Thus the addresser can be a newspaper that has authority in our society. While people might question the validity of information in an advert they do not question a newspaper. As the parents are considered to be responsible of their children, and children are depicted as being in danger in the advert we can assume that the addressees are parents. The relationship of the addressed and the addressee is also important. The person viewing the advertisement is looking at it like the woman in the picture (possibly also in their living room), they are sharing a similar situation. As the text is opposite where she is looking, and the newspaper is blocking her view from the teenage girl who is using the keyboard, while the whole situation is visible to the reader it makes them feel that they know better than the woman in the picture. It allows the reader to feel smart knowing that they could protect their children by using the company product.
However, all these functions of the signs are dependant on the social context in which they are read. Probably to a tribal person in the Amazon forest the advertisement would signify something completely different, as well as to a person who lived 100 years ago. What makes us understand the signs in the way it is intended by the marketing company is the contextual function of the signs. These signs are: the newspaper format, the computer, the Internet, society’s moral panic about pedophiles and notion of vulnerability of females, not to mention the responsibility of parents over their children – all these signs derive from the context in our society. By having contextual function, the signs reify the values and happenings in the society whether they are true or not. Although the text in the advertisement says that “Stalkers could use the Internet to contact your children”, the advertisement positions the possibility as something that all responsible parents should be afraid of – this illustrates how a rare and frightening topic is made to appear commonplace and inevitable. It associates the Internet with the stalkers, thus adding or reifying the danger of the Internet.
Illustrated in this essay we can see how advertisements not only create interest in a particular product but use social and economic mechanisms to further enhance their standing. They use the fears, expectations and desires of the public to market themselves as a need and not simply a desire. These signs, buried in the advertisement, reflect social meaning to us. They borrow competence trying to look more a public announcement or service than a commercial message. Therefore, the signs in an advertisement have various functions which combined not only reflect the social meanings attached to signs, but also produce them. The Symantec advertisement, that in essence consist of a living room scene with a woman reading a newspaper and a girl using a keyboard, makes us think that the Internet is dangerous to children and we are not responsible parents if we do not do anything about it.