AS-level English Language: ENB1 Introduction to Language

The Language of Advertising

Knowing how advertisements work will help you as such texts are common in your exam.

• In the exam, you need to remember to focus exclusively on the linguistic elements of the text you are
analysing; if you choose to analyse and comment upon photos or other images, you will lose marks.
Remember this is an English not a Media Studies exam; if you are also taking an A-level in Media Studies,
you’ll need to be extra careful here.

Advertising uses a shortcut form of information processing, one that through association. Two thoughts, one of
a product and one of a selling message, are, through the way the ad is designed, connected in the mind of its
target audience. If this works successfully, when the audience think about the selling message with its visual ‘cues’,
they will also recall the product and vice versa. In many ads, the visual message is of an attractive lifestyle (one that
the ad’s creator assumes will appeal to the target audience) and this is associated with the use of a particular product
or brand.

• Look through a few ads in a lifestyle magazine and see how this works in practice.
• Work out what the linguistic messages are ‘doing’ in the ad – are they supporting the visual messages?

‘Cueing’
The message of an advertisement is put into words and pictures by a creative team, approved by a client, distributed
through a medium like magazines or newspapers, and – assuming it gets attention – it is ‘decoded’ by its target
audience. Clearly, in order for the audience to make sense of the information, however, the message has to use
appropriate signs and symbols to stimulate the individual’s perceptual system into action. Ads can be said to work
through a system called cueing.

A cue is a signal or a reminder of something. A cue works by bringing to mind something from previous experience or
knowledge. This cue then provides a ‘framework of meaning’ that the target audience can then use to interpret the
sign or cue. Visual cues are known to be the most powerful because the visual part of the brain is far more evolved
than the linguistic side (we have been ‘seeing’ far longer than we have been using language!).

Clearly, for an ad to work, it will depend heavily on the successful functioning of the cueing process. There simply is
not time in most advertisements for elaborated message development, so the ‘message designers’ (usually the ad
agency’s creative team) depend upon rapidly interpreted cues to produce the associated meanings sufficiently quickly
and arrestingly to stop the reader for sufficient time for the ads to ‘work’. In other words, cueing drives the process of
association.

SNAPSHOT NARRATIVE
An important ‘cue’ is the creation of a ‘snapshot narrative’ – and this is often created through a mixture of images and
words. The creative teams in ad agencies know that we each carry round with us a storehouse of enduring and deep-
seated ‘stories’ (idealised stories that inform us of what romance, family life, childhood, etc. ‘mean’ in our society and
culture. In Media Studies, these are called ‘cultural myths’ because they are so deeply held yet are unrealistically
ideal).

Ad producers are adept at creating a ‘snapshot narrative’ that show a fraction of such a narrative – the ad’s reader
then fills in the remainder of the story (properly called a ‘narrative’) in which the ad’s product becomes associated with
the ‘hero’, helping the product’s buyer overcome the ‘villain.

• Ads for kitchen and bathroom cleaners often use a very obvious form of ‘snapshot narratives’. They present
bacteria as a ‘villain’, and the cleaner as the ‘hero’ – both often being animated. On buying the product, we
then become the ‘hero’ of our own narrative, in which the product is the ‘helper’ allowing us to defeat the
villainous bacteria.
 Many ads utilise some form of ‘snapshot narrative’. Find an ad that you can analyse at this level and work out
how the advertising copy helps this to happen?

Steve Campsall (Rev. 03/12/2010; 12:33) – ENB1 Advertising “Cueing”