Discussion on communication. Publicity about something or the other is abounding everywhere.

Write a 8 pages paper on communication. Publicity about something or the other is abounding everywhere. It could be the latest supermarket deal or a televised advert. Advertisement is so commonplace in the world. Yet people are unaware of the effect that advertisements have on an individual. It is the apparent ability of an advertisement to create a pseudo need or want in the viewer (Chalkley, pp. 65, 2012).

It is the pervasive powers of an advertisement that can make an individual accept or purchase something that he or she may have not previously needed. The most basic aim of an advertisement, print, or media, is to provide alluring information about any product, commodity, or service to the individual masses, and this, in turn, causes the free market economy to sustain itself. According to semiotic theory, the most important aim of an advertisement is to assume a form that is indirectly disconnected from the product knowledge aspect and directly concerned with the selling aspect. An advertisement aims to coax people into developing interest and longing for a product, service, or experience (Bell, pp. 29, 1997).

Therefore it is a sort of hedonistic approach. It tries to mimic the primal function that was traditionally taken care of by art, religion, or science. Advertisement is known as the official art of the western world. Advertisement form a body of knowledge that is composed of codes which in itself is composed of signs. These signs, according to semiotic theory claim to influence the thinking and perception of an individual who views them. Advertisements indirectly form a rudimentary perception of the world of the viewer. The semiotic theory is basically the study of nonlinguistic sign symbols. In the matter of media, it is also employed as a form of intertextuality. The capability of a sign to convey some information is dependent on the concept that it can be differentiated from other signs which look similar (Chalkley, pp. 77, 2012).

Take the example of two very different advertisements: the advertisement of the Mona Lisa as a world-famous symbol of beauty and purity versus another advertisement that uses the Mona Lisa as an example of a hairstyle. There are two very different concepts that are being employed in this case.