How to Read An Advertisment

http://www.grenoble.iufm.fr/T3/Java/Didafin4/html/guide.html

A few guideline reading an advertisement through the layout, visuals, objects, colours, characters, shots, and the picture and its zone ( graphic design and reading zone)

Literary Terms

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/lit_term.html

Language can be classified in a number of ways

• Denotation: the literal meaning of a word; there are no emotions, values, or images associated with denotative meaning. Scientific and mathematical language carries few, if any emotional or connotative meanings.
• Connotation: the emotions, values, or images associated with a word. The intensity of emotions or the power of the values and images associated with a word varies. Words connected with religion, politics, and sex tend to have the strongest feelings and images associated with them.
        For most people, the word mother calls up very strong positive feelings and associations--loving, self-sacrificing, always there for you, understanding; the denotative meaning, on the other hand, is simply "a female animal who has borne one or more chldren." Of course connotative meanings do not necessarily reflect reality; for instance, if someone said, "His mother is not very motherly," you would immediately understand the difference between motherly (connotation) and mother (denotation).
• Abstract language refers to things that are intangilble, that is, which are perceived not through the senses but by the mind, such as truth, God, education, vice, transportation, poetry, war, love. Concrete language identifies things perceived through the senses (touch, smell, sight, hearing, and taste), such as soft, stench, red, loud, or bitter.
• Literal language means exactly what it says; a rose is the physical flower. Figurative language changes the literal meaning, to make a meaning fresh or clearer, to express complexity, to capture a physical or sensory effect, or to extend meaning. Figurative language is also called figures of speech. The most common figures of speech are these:
  • A simile: a comparison of two dissimilar things using "like" or "as", e.g., "my love is like a red, red rose" (Robert Burns).
  • A metaphor: a comparison of two dissimilar things which does not use "like" or "as," e.g., "my love is a red, red rose" (Lilia Melani).
  • Personification: treating abstractions or inanimate objects as human, that is, giving them human attributes, powers, or feelings, e.g., "nature wept" or "the wind whispered many truths to me."
  • hyperbole: exaggeration, often extravagant; it may be used for serious or for comic effect.
  • Apostrophe: a direct address to a person, thing, or abstraction, such as "O Western Wind," or "Ah, Sorrow, you consume us." Apostrophes are generally capitalized.
  • Onomatopoeia: a word whose sounds seem to duplicate the sounds they describe--hiss, buzz, bang, murmur, meow, growl.
  • Oxymoron: a statement with two parts which seem contradictory; examples: sad joy, a wise fool, the sound of silence, or Hamlet's saying, "I must be cruel only to be kind"
• Elevated language or elevated style: formal, dignitifed language; it often uses more elaborate figures of speech. Elevated language is used to give dignity to a hero (note the speechs of heros like Achilles or Agamemnon in the Iliad), to express the superiority of God and religious matters generally (as in prayers or in the King James version of the Bible), to indicate the importance of certain events (the ritual language of the traditional marriage ceremony), etc. It can also be used to reveal a self-important or a pretentious character, for humor and/or for satire.

Some forms in the sample and guides for advertisement analysis

I found out some useful links and notes that will help out contracting my essay.
Advertisement Analysis Notes:
http://nccei.org/teaching/adanalysis5.html

1. Purpose
2. Picture 
3. Language 
4. Audience
5. Thecnique

How to Analyze an Advertisementhttp://www.medialit.org/reading-room/how-analyze-advertisement
 

This article originally appeared in Issue# 37

This website sort of listed down some possible question that can help develop analysis of an advertisement to find out the hidden message and uncover meanings. (Connotation)

Finding Ads' Hidden MessagesBy Arthur Asa Berger

1. What is the general ambience of the advertisement? What mood does it create? How does it do this?
   
2. What is the design of the advertisement? Does it use axial balance or some other form? How are the basic components or elements arranged?
   
3. What is the relationship between pictorial elements and written material and what does this tell us?
   
4. What is the use of space in the advertisement? Is there a lot of 'white space" or is it full of graphic and written elements?
   
5. What signs and symbols do we find? What role do they play in the ad's impact?
   
6. If there are figures (men, women, children, animals) what are they like? What can be said about their facial expressions, poses, hairstyle, age, sex, hair color, ethnicity, education, occupation, relationships (of one to the other)?
   
7. What does the background tell us? Where is the advertisement taking place and what significance does this background have?
   
8. What action is taking place in the advertisement and what significance does it have? (This might be described as the ad's "plot.")
   
9. What theme or themes do we find in the advertisement? What is it about? (The plot of an advertisement may involve a man and a woman drinking but the theme might be jealousy, faithlessness, ambition, passion, etc.)
   
10. What about the language used? Does it essentially provide information or does it try to generate some kind of emotional response? Or both? What techniques are used by the copywriter: humor, alliteration, definitions" of life, comparisons, sexual innuendo, and so on?
    
11. What typefaces are used and what impressions do they convey?
    
12. What is the item being advertised and what role does it play in American culture and society?
    
13. What about aesthetic decisions? If the advertisement is a photograph, what kind of a shot is it? What significance do long shots, medium shots, close-up shots have? What about the lighting, use of color, angle of the shot?
    
14. What sociological, political, economic or cultural attitudes are indirectly reflected in the advertisement? An advertisement may be about a pair of blue jeans but it might, indirectly, reflect such matters as sexism, alienation, stereotyped thinking, conformism, generational conflict, loneliness, elitism, and so on.

Advertising Analysis by Antonio Lopez
www.world-bridger.com
This article sort of showing technique of creating an advertisement by paying attention on the ways of language of text and emotion.


In http://www.medialiteracy.net/pdfs/hooks.pdf  it explained the media employ specific techniques to construct believable stories to hook our attention through psychological devices and technical effects. The techniques are vast and many, but some common ones are easily recognizable and are identified here.Common Attention-Getting Hooks:
Emotional Transfer is the process of generating emotions in order to
transfer them to a product. For example, a Coke ad shows happy,
beautiful people but tells us nothing about the product. The point is to
make you feel good and to transfer that feeling to the brand or product.
This is the number one and most important process of media
manipulation.

Common Attention-Getting Hooks:
Sex sells, without exception, Fear, Symbols ,Humor, Hype, Fitting In, Cute, Vague, Testimonials, etc

Touching Thai Life Insurance Ads

Tittle : Silence Of Love

F&N Teh Tarik Ori Ads

Tittle: Macha, Lowe & Partners

Celestial Movies Ads

Tittle: Break Up
Company: Naga DDB
Year: 2011

Awesome Campaign- Don't Feed the Bugs

Don't Feed the Bugs
McCann Erickson (M) Sdn Bhd

The entire campaign was super awesome. Don’t Feed the Bugs is a website to create organ donation awareness towards publics through online communication. User experience throughout this website is to drag & drop all the insects into zip zap before they start to eat the human organ. This website contains a lot of useful information such as procedure to donate your organ, facts, myths, allows you to share it from your facebook and twitter, and join facebook fan page and provides link for users who are interested to find out more. 

Attractive animations and full of interactions that allow user to play around with.

Website: http://www.dontfeedthebugs.my/