SEMIOTIC APPROACH TO ANALYSIS OF ADVERTISING

As Gilbert Cohen-Seat says, we live in a universe of icono-sphere. We are surrounded by number of signs of different nature and different affiliation to sign systems. The same is true for advertising that works with signs and sign systems quite significantly, utilizing them particularly for commercial purposes. However, it is not easy to understand each sign immediately. We may suppose that the recipient and the advertiser have common interests (although their motives are quite different) and one of these interests refers to the need to understand signs in the best and quickest ways possible. Semiotics refers to the explanation of mechanisms and functions of the text as well as visual communicators and gives us a chance of better understanding of the nature of the social processes. It studies how the signs produce meanings while presuming that such meanings depend on structural alignment of signs that comes into existence through the processes of signification. Advertising seeks to influence recipients and motivates them to purchase goods or services or change their awareness of a brand. Production and reception of advertisements is linked to characteristic processes of semiosis that are different than in case of other types of audio-visual products. We work with an assumption that the advertising is, full of other denotative and connotative stimuli. for the semiotic analysis. As well as the culture, the advertising cannot be reduced only to semiotics - as it is impossible to reduce material life only to mental events - since creating advertisements is not only about signification and communication. On the other hand, the insight into advertising sub specie semiotica allows us to understand it more thoroughly. In the presented article we aim, on the ground of semiotics, to reveal elements of the process and functions of advertising in order to explain the ways it influences the recipients.