Advertising

Advertising is a mass-mediated communication. For communication to be classified as advertising it must be paid for, delivered to an audience via mass media, and be attempting to persuade (ciaadvertising.org 2003).

In this article which I found in guardian.co.uk (2007), is about an advertisement for a health drink has been ruled to be misleading for implying that it was recommended by three-quarters of doctors to the exclusion of other brands.

Making advertisements is to advertise products and promote the reputation of a company. Not only must the advertisement effectively communication the desired message, but the individual audience must be willing to "buy into" the desired message (ciaadvertising.org 2003). We can see all types of advertisements on television, billboards, newspapers, flyers, internet and lots more.

Advertisements are like a multimodal layout. Multimodal texts are those texts that have more than one ‘mode’, so that meaning is communicated through a synchronisation of modes. For example, words with videos, images, music or sound (Walsh, M 2006). This advertisement has text and pictures in it with big words in green colour and the beverage product beside it.

"Image of the Flora advertisement"

According to Walsh (2006), the purpose of each of these texts is to engage the reader in a literary narrative and the affordances of the modes, verbal and visual, are therefore designed to maximize the engagement in story and to create particular effects such as humour or fear. In this Flora health drink advertisement, it causes some disagreements to the public as it has misleading information in it.

Everybody have their own interpretation on text. It depends on their cultural background and the thinking of each person. Some people may think that it is just an advertisement and it is their own choice to choose the health drink they want to buy. Not everyone follows what the doctor’s recommendation. Maybe some people will choose it regarding the taste, price, flavour and many more perspectives.

Reference List:
ciaadvertising.org 2003, What is Advertising?, viewed 26th October 2007, <http://www.ciadvertising.org/studies/student/98_fall/theory/hornor/what.htm>

Tryhorn, C 2007, ‘Tough remedy for health drink ad’, viewed 26th October 2007, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/oct/31/asa.advertising>

Walsh, M 2006, The ‘Textual shift’: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, Australian journal of language and literacy, vol.29, no.1, pp.24-37.