“Naive inhabitants of consumerland believe that advertising is childish, dumb, a bunch of lies, and influences only the vast hordes of the less sophisticated…”
Jeffrey Schrank, The Language of Advertising Claims
Despite what people say, advertisers know that language and images work at both the conscious and the unconscious level, and a person unaware of advertising’s claim on him or her is the person least well equipped to resist its insidious attack, no matter how forthright they may sound. An essential underpinning to the language and literature course is the aim for you to become media-literate and an important purpose of a classroom study of advertising is to raise the level of awareness about the persuasive techniques used in ads. Ads can be studied to detect ‘hooks,’ they can be used to gauge values of consumers, and they can be analysed for symbols, colour, and imagery. And don’t neglect the simplest and most direct way of studying ads – the words themselves. Begin your study by browsing through the following articles to discover the ways adverts communicate both verbally and visually:
Reading Challenge
This is a longer and more challenging text, but spending time on this piece, and discussing it with your teacher, will help you master this topic:
Area of Exploration Conceptual Guiding Question
Just as language use varies between text types and literary works, so does the structure and style of a a text. These non-lexical features can sometimes be as important to the meaning of a text as a writer’s choice of words when they impact on a reader’s interpretation. This resource will help you discover how typographical features, such as choice of font and colour imagery, can affect your interpretation of a given advert, and help you answer the conceptual question:
Discussion Points
After you’ve got your head around the material in this section, pair up, pick a question, spend five minutes thinking and noting down your thoughts – then discuss your ideas with a friend and report back to the class:
- If advertising works in the psychological or subconscious arenas, is it possible for anybody to resist advertising?
- Do you admire any adverts for their creativity, originality and innovation? Can you think of examples of particularly creative adverts? Are advertisements only supposed to persuade or can they be appreciated as creative or aesthetic acts?
- Is it necessary to be cynical about all advertising? When you boil it down, is advertising always about money? Have you had any positive experiences with advertising?
1. Basic Appeals
“An advertising message contains something primary and primitive, an emotional appeal, that in effect is the thin end of the wedge, trying to find its way into a mind.”
Jib Fowles, Advertising’s 15 Basic Appeals
In 1982, in the blandly named Journal of General Semantics, a seminal essay in the study of advertising was published: Advertising’s 15 Basic Appeals. It was written by Jib Fowles (1940 – 2020) an American Media studies scholar best known for his work on advertising and communication. Today, this essay remains a cornerstone piece in the study of advertising and the mass media. Fowles explores the psychological strategies behind modern advertising, revealing how advertisers tap into fundamental human drives to influence consumer behaviour. He outlines fifteen emotional appeals – ranging from the need for sex or companionship to the desires for autonomy, escape, and even social prominence – that advertisers use to connect with audiences on a subconscious, secondary level. Fowles tells us that ads don’t just sell products; they resonate with people’s inner motivations, desires, and even their fears – all in the name of parting people from their hard earned cash!
Activity: Cracking Fowles’ Appeals
Advertising is never just about the product – it’s about the why behind the buy. In this exercise, can you uncover the hidden strategies that make ads persuasive? You’ll see a series of advertisements, each using one or more of the 15 basic appeals (such as the desire for status and beauty, to the need for security or belonging). See if you can decode the appeal(s) at work. What subconscious desires are these ads tapping into?
2. Visual Narratives
“Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.”
David Ogilvy, born 1911, dubbed the ‘Pope ofModern Advertising’
A visual narrative is a story told primarily through visual elements rather than words. In advertising, this means using images and design to convey a message, evoke a feeling, or guide the viewer through a sequence of ideas or emotions. Think of a Nike ad: a lone runner pounds the pavement in the rain. The image tells a story of perseverance and grit. The visual narrative is built through the runner’s posture, the weather, the lighting, and the brand’s iconic swoosh.More specifically, visual narratives in ads include characters or figures that represent the target audience or brand identity; a setting that situates the product in a relatable (or aspirational world); an implied sequence that implies movement or change so that you can see the story in a single image; symbolism to create meaning and resonance; framing and composition that guides the reader’s eye towards key elements; and a colour scheme that evokes the mood or personality of the brand. You can study a campaign which encapsulates the art of visual storytelling in still images by looking at this advert from the Dress to Kill series, by Wallis:
Activity: Dress to Kill
The Wallis Dress to Kill advertising campaign, launched in 1998, was a landmark in fashion marketing. Created by Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), the campaign was a complete rebrand for the British womenswear retailer Wallis. At the heart of the campaign was a play on the phrase ‘Dress to Kill.’ More than a metaphor for stylish dressing, the campaign took the idea literally, portraying women in striking outfits in scenes ripped from an imaginary noir-ish world. In these ads, women are powerful femme fatales and men are in deadly danger of being imminently dispatched. Shot in dramatic black and white by photographer Bob Carlos Clarke, the ads were edgy, laced with dark humour. Images of unapologetically confident women resonated with a younger, fashion-conscious audience. The campaign achieved remarkable success, revitalising the struggling the Wallis brand as daring and forward-thinking. The campaign’s impact was cemented by two Cannes Gold Lions and three prestigious D&AD Pencil awards. Use your newfound skills in breaking down visual narratives to annotate and present one of the adverts in Wallis’ famous campaign:
3. Can a Picture Tell A Thousand Words?
“Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.”
Arthur Brisbane, 1911
The phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” is an old expression from the early twentieth century. It probably started in America, and the earliest known attribution was by Arthur Brisbane, a newspaper editor, in a speech to an advertising men’s club in 1911. Later, ad-man Fred R. Barnard popularized the phrase in Printer’s Ink, an advertising trade journal. He used the phrase to promote the use of images in advertisements and even fabricated a Chinese origin story to give it more weight! Despite this false claim, there is no verified Chinese origin, although a similar Chinese proverb is “Seeing once is better than hearing a hundred times” (百闻不如一见). Whatever the true provenance of the phrase, ‘a picture is better than a thousand words’ has become synonymous with commending the effectiveness of graphics in advertising.
Images are part of the way we communicate and, through the Language and Literature course, it would be impossible to talk about how language operates in the world without considering the operations and impact of images. Many of the texts we encounter include images and certain texts, such as road signs or paintings in an art gallery, might be made of images alone. Images are an integral part of most advertisement texts; multimodal texts, such as adverts, are those that combine both visual images and the written (or spoken) word. This section will give you the opportunity to understand images better by learning how to analyze composition components such as layout, use of lines, shapes and forms, light and colour and so on.
Activity: visual technique matching
Here is a selection of visual and composition techniques that you will see frequently in advertising, as well as other visual texts (such as photoessays and infographics). Can you pair each technique with the advertisement that uses it most prominently? Of course, it would be hard to design an image using only a single technique, but nevertheless you should try to create a complete set of pairs by choosing the strongest match each time. Practice your analysis skills by suggesting the effects created in each image.
4. ‘Water is Wet’: and other Advertising Claims
“A person unaware of advertising’s claim on him or her is precisely the one most defenceless against the ad-writer’s attack.”
Jeffrey Schrank
Jeffrey Schrank is a teacher made famous for his critical analysis of advertising. His most famous essay –The Language of Advertising Claims – has been widely used on media literacy courses around the world. He focuses on the subtle, manipulative techniques advertisers use on consumers, especially through hard-to-detect uses of language. While his theories are advanced, his background as a teacher means his writing is accessible and valuable to students hoping to better understand the persuasive power of advertising. In “The Language of Advertising Claims,” Schrank categorises common advertising techniques (such as weasel words, vague claims, and endorsements) that blur the line between truth and manipulation. Schrank argues that the power of ads lies in their ability to influence unconsciously. By breaking down ten distinct types of claims, he helps us critically evaluate the hidden messages of advertising.
Activity: watch out for weasels and ‘ware water being wet
How do advertisers turn simple phrases into tools of influence? After reading Jeffrey Shrank’s essay, put your critical thinking skills to the test by looking at this collection of advertisements and identifying the types of claims they use. Look for techniques such as vague claims, weasel words, and the ‘water is wet’ fallacy… and more:
Learner Portfolio: School Ad
It’s time to get creative and put your newfound knowledge to the test. Work in small groups to create an image that sells a product or service to other students in school. For an extra challenge, align your advert with one of the school values. Incorporate the techniques of visual rhetoric that you’ve learned in this section. Capture and edit an image, create a slogan, even deesign a logo for your product or service, before publishing your advert to the world. Seek feedback and write a reflection that can go in your Learner Portfolio.
Here’s a couple of examples of advertising creativity inspired by this short project.
Body of Work: Diesel Be Stupid Ad Campaign
Diesel’s campaign from Anomaly New York is just plain stupid. The risqué work celebrates stupidity as a kind of liberating antidote to intelligence, which, in the current political climate, you might think is a dangerous philosophy to have. According to the brand’s ‘Be Stupid Philosophy’: “Stupid is the relentless pursuit of a regret-free life. Only stupid can be truly brilliant.” You can find out more about the campaign here.
Diesel’s ‘Be Stupid’ campaign is a perfect example of how advertising uses multimodal strategies to construct meaning. These ads combine bold design, provocative slogans, and carefully arranged visuals to tell stories of youthful defiance that challenge norms, celebrate risk-taking, and frame ‘stupidity’ as a form of freedom. The campaign doesn’t just sell clothes; it sells an outlook on life, using visual composition, colour, and figures of young people in a variety of settings to create narratives of rebellion and individuality.
As you study this Body of Work, you should explore how the visual and verbal intertwine to persuade and provoke. How do camera angles, body language, and framing signal transgressive behaviour? How does the interplay of text and image invite viewers to identify with the idea of rebellion? And what cultural values surrounding our expectations – and fears – of young people are reinforced through these choices?
Towards Assessment: Individual Oral
Supported by an extract from one non-literary text and one from a literary work, students will offer a prepared response of 10 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of questions by the teacher, to the following prompt: Examine the ways in which the global issue of your choice is presented through the content and form of two of the texts that you have studied. (40 marks)
The Diesel ‘Be Stupid’ campaign would work very well as a non-literary text in your Individual Oral assessment. Here are two suggestions as to how you might use this Body of Work to create a Global Issue. You can use one of these ideas, or develop your own. You should always be mindful of your own ideas and class discussions and follow the direction of your own thoughts, discussions and programme of study when devising your assessment tasks.
- Field of Inquiry: Culture, Community and Identity
- Global Issue: The Roles and Expectations of Young People in Society
- Rationale:
Depending on the time and place, how young people relate to wider society has been a contentious issue, and ideas about how young people fit in – or should fit in – range all the way from the Victorian ideal of ‘children should be seen and not heard’ to very liberal attitudes towards children; ‘let kids be kids.’ These adverts bring up a whole range of other issues such as the sexualisation and trivialisation of young people, attitudes towards education, and even safety concerns. An apt literary pairing might be Broken April by Ismail Kadare. Gjorg is anything but a typical teenager, burdened with cultural expectations that he just can’t escape. This Global Issue is also present in Yiyun Li’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayer. In several of her short stories, she depicts the struggles of young people trying to live up to their parents’ expectations, and the expectations of an entire culture – while trying to navigate through their own troubles at the same time.
- Field of Inquiry: Art, Creativity and Imagination
- Global Issue: The Malleability of Words and Meaning
- Rationale:
The Diesel Be Stupid campaign demonstrates the truth of a linguistic aphorism: the meaning of words is not fixed. When they say ‘Be Stupid’ the company wants you to have a particular meaning of ‘stupid’ in mind. For them, stupidity is about rebelliousness, creativity, fearlessness and independence. How well do they succeed? Well, that’s for you to unpick in your talk. An example of a perfect pairing would be the literary works Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet or The Visit by Friedrich Durrenmatt. In both these dark comedies, the meaning of words is never fixed. Communication is only ever a one way street, and you can’t trust anything you hear.
Towards Assessment: Higher Level Essay
Students submit an essay on one non-literary text or a collection of non-literary texts by one same author, or a literary text or work studied during the course. The essay must be 1,200-1,500 words in length. (20 marks).
If you are an HL student, you might consider using this text to write your HL Essay. Here are one or two examples of lines of inquiry suitable for this text – but remember to follow your own interests and the direction of your own class discussion to generate your own line of inquiry. It is not appropriate for students to submit responses to an essay question that has been assigned:
- How does Diesel use clothing and nudity as signifiers of conformity and rebelliousness in its Be Stupid campaign adverts?
- How does Diesel combine text and image to reposition ‘stupid’ as a metaphor for creativity and spontaneity?
Paper 1 Text Type Focus: Public Service Announcements (PSA)
Advertising is a wide and varied genre, ranging from print ads that you might find in a magazine to huge billboards overlooking a busy road, to posters on the sides of buildings, to webpages… and more. Some adverts rely more strongly on visuals for their appeal – they have to quickly hook a reader’s attention if they are on the move or flicking idly through a magazine. However, other adverts contain extensive copy that tries to manipulate the reader in more subtle ways. Use these practice texts to familiarise yourself with the different features of Advertisements and add them to your Learner Portfolio; you will want to revise text types thoroughly before your Paper 1 exam. You can find more information – including text type features and sample Paper 1 analysis – by visiting 20/20. Read through one or two of the exemplars, then choose a new paper and have a go at writing your own Paper 1 analysis response:
- TBC
IB Language and Literature 2.0 