Semiotic approaches to advertising texts and strategies: Narrative, passion, marketing

Advertising communication plays a rather particular role in semiotic studies in the second half of the 20th century. The first pioneering studies of advertising messages, in particular those of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, date to the 60s, and were carried out for the most part using the tools of classical rhetoric. Following a period in which semiotics displayed a relative lack of interest in advertisements, in the 80s advertising texts were used as examples in applied narratological analysis by Jean-Marie Floch and others. This occurred at the same time as the so-called “passion turn of semiotics”, which stressed that the passions and emotions present in texts are crucial issues in textual semiotics, and it also seemed to offer fresh perspectives for the analysis of advertising communication. The passion turn took account of the evolution of advertising itself: it should in fact be evident that modern-day advertising is less and less interested in telling stories and more and more in conveying passions and emotions. The effectiveness of an advert tends to be closely bound up with the presentation of sensations associated with a given product or brand. Recently, semioticians have begun to study more general features of advertising and marketing discourse.