Unit 5: The components of an advertisement
Case study of advertising components: 33 Symantec

Some text can go here. 33original Consider the Symantec advertisement on the left (Rolling Stone, May 9, 2002, p.7). There is a very strong diagonal effect in the images, from the Symantec symbol to the yellow square to the woman's head to the cat. The yellow straight lines connect "System Repair" through the yellow square to the laptop computer that the woman is using. A person is necessary here to show that the computer is being used, and therefore, in a usable state. So, if it had been broken, it is now fixed. From the reader's perspective, the advertisement is a message which is being presented, and under the assumption of rational and cooperative communication, there must be a reason (or reasons) why each part of the advertisement is the way it is, and why it is where it is. The reader must infer the relevance of these parts to the whole message. And if the creator of the advertisement has been successful, the reader will make the inferences that the creator intended.

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If you click on any of the Symantec images, a new window will pop up in which you can cycle through all the images corresponding to the thumbnails shown on this page.

33basic Following the approach that we have adopted here of considering the elements of an advertisement and their organization, we can follow the chains of relevance by taking the advertisement apart. We begin with 33basic, which has just the Symantec logo and the picture of the computer, woman and cat. To avoid any extra inferences, we have removed the Symantec box and smaller print text from the bottom of the original advertisement. 33basic does not have enough information in it for us to compute the relevance of the parts, and therefore the meaning of the whole. Unless there is some very strong recognition associated with the name "Symantec", we cannot tell what this picture is supposed to be an advertisement for. Given the connotations of the image -- a healthy, happy woman leading a fulfilling life, one might be most likely to view this as an advertisement for some kind of health or well-being product. (With strong recognition of a company name, just a little more text can be sufficient. Look at, for example 10 Burger King.)

Suppose we just add in the words "System repair" by themselves, as in 33repair1. We have left the text in its original position, which is perhaps not ideal for an advertisement with just these components. You can compare 33repair1 with 33repair2 and 33 repair3 which have the same images and text, but different organizations. With the text in its original position, it is still quite difficult to get some meaning for the whole advertisement. If you just compare these three hypothetical advertisements, which one is most likely to be successful, in your opinion? Is it the one with the text in the same place as the original, or not? The original advertisement is in the "before-after" style (refer to Unit 12), where the product is offered as part of the solution to a problem. While "System repair" presupposes that something was broken, and hence in need of repair, the reduced form of the advertisement in 33repair1 probably does not have quite enough information for the reader to be able to compute the necessary inferences. 33repair1 33repair2 33repair3

33text The extra information is presented for you in 33text. In this version, "System repair" stands out against "System crash" etc. in two ways: it is offset to the left, more in vertical line with the woman's head, and it is a solid black, matching the way "Symantec" is presented at the top left. 33text may not be a perfect advertisement in terms of layout and organization, but it has the minimum level of informativeness; the relevance of the text and image can be computed. The message is clear -- Symantec offers "System repair" solutions to the problems mentioned in the other part of the text, and the image is of a woman leading a happy and productive life with her computer. Ask yourself this question: is this an image of the woman and computer after the computer suffered from some problem that was fixed by a Symantec product? If the answer is Yes, ask yourself this: How did you know?

33lines All of the images that we have considered so far lack the straight yellow lines and the square yellow box of the original. What is the relevance of the lines and the box? As you think about this, look at 33lines which has the lines but no box, and compare that with 33box which has the box but no lines. I think you will agree that 33lines reinforces the kind of interpretation we just saw for 33text, but 33box is rather anomalous, with the yellow box floating in mid-air (though it is on a clear diagonal from "Symantec" to the woman's head and the cat).

33box It seems to be that, in the original advertisement 33symantec, the yellow lines originate at "System repair" and flow through the box to the computer; this follows the top-to-bottom natural flow of the advertisement, especially in the original with the extra material at the bottom. Assuming that flow through space like this corresponds to a flow through time, ask yourself this question: does something happen at the point when the line passes through the box? Was that the point of "System Repair"? If so, how did you know?

After you have thought about the different versions of the advertisement that are presented in this section, think what you could conclude about how the parts of an advertisement relate to each other. The text may perform the function of anchorage, indicating how you might interpret the image. To accomplish this in the way the creator of the advertisement intended, though, you must be able to calculate the relevance of the text to the image(s), and if there are multiple images or symbols, their relevance to each other would be considered to be important (and therefore something that, as a reader, you must calculate).