Persuasive Sign

Reading Summary

The paper starts off with an example of an ad for Marilyn Peach, which uses a technique called “connotative chaining”. The paper reveals that this chaining is what causes ads to be effective. The paper then goes into another example of connotative chaining which correlates colors and signs of a cologne bottle to mythology. Overall, the article is stressing the importance of which connotative chaining has on the overall effectiveness of an ad and in certain cases, it is quite important to take in colors, layout, and possible symbols to account to clearly convey a subconscious message in the viewer’s head.

Outside Example

I thought this advertisement for Ray-Ban, the sunglasses company was interesting due to its bold colors and interesting combination of objects. A first glance at it may cause one to think “Huh that’s interesting. Theres a stick of lit dynamite in a paint bucket and a girl wearing some ray bans next to it. This is a cool ad because I think the colors look pretty sick too”. But underneath this surface level there are some aspects that help set in some ideas into a viewer’s subconscious.

Personal Connection

So the main connotative chain I see here could be interpreted as, dynamite+paint -> big mess -> not easy to hide an explosion of color -> maybe don’t hide because the color is cool -> you think these colors are cool in your head, so see how this explosion of color is pretty sick? -> Ray-Ban’s has this explosion of color -> Ray-Ban’s are sick. In addition to this, one can compare this idea of a cool explosion of color to glasses by the layout of the ad itself being split up into two separate ideas, the girl and the paint, each one representing the left and right lens. The colors by themselves also have a meaning to say “These are bold colors and you know what else is bold? Ray Bans. See? They’re so bold, we’re saying that you shouldn’t hide and ray bans will help you stick out and be cool”