THE COMMUNICATIVE STRUCTURE AND SIGNIFICATION OF ADVERTISING

CHO, BYUNG-LYANG(The Graduate School of Hanyang University)

The purpose of this study is to examine the communicative structure and signification process of advertising in which communicator, text and receiver interact together. The structure of advertising text means the ways in which signs are organized and articulated. The signification refers to the process of "Making sense of texts," as the text ts encoded and decoded.

This study stands on an assumption that the signification process in advertisement cannot be separated into such discrete moments as producing, text and receiving, but rather has to be integrated into a communication process as a whole. This assumption leads us to a postulate that advertising is a communication system where producers construct, wittingly or unwittingly, a meaningful text by putting a set of signs together and receivers interpret it in their own cultural frames of reference. This study is, therefore, an analysis of the process of production and exchange of meanings addressed in advertisements(Coca Cola ads.).

With regard to the structure and intention of advertising texts constructed by producers, the Coca Cola advertising plan was analyzed. A series of depth interview were also conducted to identify producers' intention. An analysis of the manifest and latent meanings of the Coca Cola ads was done by applying a content analysis and a semiotic analysis. The meanings decoded by receivers were identified through open - ended group discussions among four different subcultural groups.

The analysis of unpublished advertising plans and producers' intentions found that when producers arrange a set of signs into an advertisement, they tend to draw an ideal world of Coca Cola represented by youth, joyfulness, sophisticatedness and activity, avoiding the real world of conflicts and contradictions. Such finding supports the claim that the mordern advertising presents "uniform ideology" to consumer.

Secondly, both content analysis and semiotic analysis yielded conclusions, that the manifest meanings of the advertisements appear from the paradigmatic relations of signs, and that a many of unintended or "floating" Meanings come out of the syntagmatic relations of signs which work on the basis of cultural referent system.

As far as the meanings constructed by interpreters who have different cultural backgrounds are concerned, this study confirmed the arguement that multiple interpretations of the texts occur according to the cultural frames of reference. When the commodities (Coca Cola) in the advertisements are transformed into such natural objects as ice, water, rever and mountains, four decoding groups tended to respond in the preferred way of decoding. The negotiated and oppositional responses appeared when reciever groups read the tonality and mood that were not fit to their subcultural frames. In particular, the gourps of workers and university students tend to read some dominant meanings oppositionally.

In conclusion, the above findings imply that the meanings of the advertisements are not transmitted through the lonear line of producer - text - receiver, but the meanings come out of the "overdetermined" interaction between the producer and the receiver mediated by the text.