Visual semiotics and interpretation in the television commercial

Abstract

Visual communication does not include language codes; it leaves the visual message and the recipient alone. This paper focuses on the production of meaning from visual messages in advertising from a semiotic analysis perspective which can be examined through viewer responses to identify patterns of meaning construction. For this purpose, we have investigated one specific advertisement (the Coca cola light commercial which ran in Turkey during the second half of the year 2004) and asked a group of viewers to produce the meanings of the images in the commercial. The results yielded that the viewers noted more iconic message elements than symbolic or indexical ones; however, symbolic meaning seems to be more effective than iconic meaning.