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Semiotic Analysis

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Semiotic Analysis
Television is one of the leading ways companies market their products. As consumers it should be our responsibility to know and understand what these advertisements actually mean. Through semiotic analysis we are able to de-code what goes through the minds of marketers when advertising a product and fully understand what the advertisement means. In this essay a semiotic analysis will be applied to Apple’s commercial on the I Phone 5 to determine how the use of signs represent the ideologies of class and wealth.
The commercial I chose to analyze was on Apples new product the I Phone 5. This commercial was exhibiting the joy that the product can bring to the consumer, due to the technological advancements of their product. This commercial focused on the camera app and displayed the high quality of the photos that it can take. The commercial showed people of all different ages using the phone, attempting to, target a wide range of consumers. It was also evident through the different screenings shown that every person who was using the I Phone 5 was happy and smiling due to the high quality of pictures that the phone can take. At the end of the commercial we hear a male voice announce that more photos are taken with the I Phone 5 than any other camera, which makes us think that it must be a good product. Overall, the commercial was inferring that their product brings joy to people of all different ages and can capture moments that you would want to remember and it will do all of that with very high quality. This is attempting to convince people of a higher class that this product will meet their standards of what they would expect in a high end product.
In order to understand a television commercial, different aspects of a semiotic analysis must be understood starting with the sign, signifier and signified. A sign can be looked at as an idea or a mechanism that communicates meaning (O’Shaugnessy, Stadler, 2012). The signifier, also known as denotation, is the

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