A study on narrative structural analysis of television advertisement*

Young Won Jin(Department of communication & Jounalism Graduate School, Kyungpook National University Taegu, Korea)

* A thesis submitted to the Counsel of the Graduate

School of Kyungpook National Umversity in papal

fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master

of Arts in December 1997.

Narrative as a story-telling, in the same manner with language, is a basic tool of which human understand things and experiences the world and a mechanism of recognition. Television is an organization that produces the greatest of a number of narrative in modern society. Especially television advertisement substitutes it with introduction of short stories as the most efficient appealing strategy. At this point, this study tried to figure out narrative strategy of television advertisement by analysing it's narrative structure.

Narrative works, largely, have a structure which consists of content plane('story') and expression plane('discourse'). Narrative theory is based on structural linguistics, and researches not substances but forms. Therefore, applied to the narrative theory, narrative structural analysis is proved by two kinds of analysis ; content form about what is told and expression form about how it is told.

Also, narrative is 'story-telling' and has a communicative characteristic, thus its most distinguished characteristic is the existence of speaker and listner. So, by classifying advertisement types with the necessary participants of narrative communication process, it substituted the study of expression(discourse). It also tried to contribute to more accurate study by analyzing content(story) plane of this classified advertisement with characteristics of expression again.

Here advertisement is classified according to narrator and implied consumer types.

First, 'autobiographical advertisement' is the simpliest form in which the narrator-"I" communicates with audiences directly. This narrator plays a role of breaking the boundary between fictitious world of advertisement and reality of outside the text. Secondly, in 'narrational advertisement', though it doesn't indicate in directly, it breaks this boundary by employing a voice-over narrators who interpellate "You"-the consumer seeing the actual advertisement and characters. Since those narrators have no contact with the characters of story and never involve with the situation at all, they offer a quite fair and objective impression to the audiences. Thirdly, 'dramatic advertisement' is a form in which camera shows the characters' behaviors and speeches as if performing a drama.

Above mentioned three types of advertisements have each different structure according to the characteristics of narrator and implied consumers-discourse's characteristics. To begin with, there is a narrative structure immanent in arrangement and choice of narrative units as the character who appears. In advertisement these narrative units have a certain directionality, being selected and arranged with the product as the center. The standard is discriminated which consists of before use of the product and after use in accordance with its user non-user, and using passage of time by whether the product is used or not. As the result, it has been proved that non-users and the state before use of the product is very negative, passive, and an object of processing situation or incident, while users and the state after use is very positive, active and a suject of stuation. At the same time, there is a narrative structure as a principle where figures, backgrounds and incidents arriving on the scene of the story perform in time order and connect with each other. It is a diagram of balance, unbalance and re-balance that consists of a series of 'states' and 'passage'. The balance presented in the introduction of the advertisement indicates the state that product is nonexisted, lacked, and it must be improved into product. Complaints caused by nonexistence or lack of product, inconvenience etc are presented in an unbalanced state. Unbalance offers a motivation that creates feelings of some kind of deficiency and complaints out of ordinary life which has been described as balanced. What leads an unbalanced state into a re-balanced state is after all, the product as a savior, compensator, and hero.

Advertisement itself is a langue, and always offers a common presentation('to purchase'). As one of institutions in a society, advertisement suggests only one thing. The presentation that advertisement suggests is a message that ourselves or our lives would change by purchasing something more.