Visual researh in advertising communication / Визуальные исследования в рекламной коммуникации

Introduction

Like no other form of modern mass communication, advertising communication requires comprehensive media education and media literacy. On the one hand, advertising refers to everything related to marketing communications that ensure product promotion. That is, in the public mind, advertising is responsible for everything. On the other hand, there is a strongly negative attitude towards advertising. The implementation of the most important functions of advertising – economic, social, and educational – is not taken into account. The main thing is that advertising is a very complex communication tool that requires specific competencies, the formation of which must be dealt with systematically, which implies explaining the language of advertising to the mass consumer and the popularization of this communication.

Our study of the advertising dissertations submitted at the dissertation councils regulated by the Higher Attestation Commission of the Russian Federation over a period of 25 years (from 1990 to 2015) found 985 titles. While a quarter of the dissertations were devoted to textual aspects, we cannot yet refer to advertising textual studies as an established academic field in Russia. The main problems are the underdeveloped conceptual apparatus, the absence of the passport of the academic field and the lack of textual analysis methodology.

This article is devoted to the phenomenology of the advertising text as a communicative phenomenon.

Problem Statement

The traditional areas of Russian advertising research are advertising discourse analysis (Emelina, 2019; Ezhova, 2018), visual rhetoric (Kameneva, Rabkina, Araeva & Gorbacheva, 2018), advertising (visual) image and the phenomenon of visualization in advertising (Edwards, 2019; Ezhova & Ezhov, 2018; Voroshilova, 2017 and others).

Comprehensive and interdisciplinary studies promise, perhaps, the most interesting results. In our case, these are traditional textual and visual studies. We especially note the study of a “text tetragon” consisting of text, context, subtext and context in Yu. A. Sorokin (Sorokin, 2008) and text, context, hypertext (intertext) in T. N. Suminova (Suminova, 2006).

In this regard, the books “Farewell to visual research” (Elkins, Manghani & Frank, 2015) and “Visual communication” (Jamieson, 2007).

A key feature of modern visual culture is the quantitative and qualitative growth of various information visualization technologies, which leads to the emergence of new visual environments and new means of visual communication (Anashkina & Tkachenko, 2017).

A phenomenological approach to the study of the visual field – modern visual culture and visual communication – was proposed in the dissertation of A. S. Reutov (Reutov, 2018).

In the framework of our approach, it is important that research into the interpretation of fiction from the point of view of their social function began back in the 1970s (Bezzubova, 2014).

On the one hand, the visual oversaturation of the information environment leads to a decrease in the effectiveness of advertising communication. The consequence of this is the search for new ways and means of influencing the consumer. However, the aggressive, intrusive bombardment of sound and visual images leads to advertising communication becoming one of the «violators» of the human visual ecology (Anashkina & Tkachenko, 2017).

However, in his analytical review of the basic works of leading art historians who in the last century studied visual culture, the history of images, the structure of vision and visualization practices, N. Mazur, the leading St Petersburg specialist in visual research, notes that there is still no common understanding of the subject and methods of the new research area of visual studies, so it is premature to talk about the emergence of a full-fledged discipline and, all the more, a scientific paradigm, that is, a fundamental scientific theory, which would be universally recognized and begin to determine the general direction of development of science (Mazur, 2018).

Research Questions

Visual research is characterized by the expansion (compared with the history of art) of the scope of attention: all images (not just artistic, aesthetically significant), as well as the processes of their production, translation, interpretation, etc., the whole aesthetic dimension are conditioned by a social dimension. In the case of advertising, it is also condition by pragmatic aspects because of the instrumental nature of advertising: advertising is only a communicative marketing tool, its derivative, its function.

Based on this principle of source analysis, we will try to expand the object of study – an advertising text as the final communicative product – by adding pre-text reconstruction (a client brief and a creative concept), attention to the context and intertext (an advertising communication environment) and a subtext (the source’s rhetorical ethos or a performer factor).

Purpose of the Study

We define the concept of advertising communication as a variety of forms, methods and means of conveying by an advertiser (the subject of commercial, social or political relations) advertising information about a product being promoted on the market (a product, a service, an event or intellectual property) and a company’s image to a potential target audience initiated by the advertiser and ensuring the achievement of the goal set within a specific advertising campaign, for which a pragmatically justified creative methods and means of influence are used.

An advertising visual research case study will allow us to show the complexity and depth of advertising communication, its unique specificity.

The purpose of this study is to describe a new comprehensive methodology for analyzing the advertising text, which takes into account the context of advertising communication, identifies intertextual connections and even subjective factors that have influenced the advertising communication.

Research Methods

Our research methodology expands the boundaries of the advertising text, and even in the absence of access to client and agent information allows us to justify the right to protect the representativeness of the received data, since, by analyzing the final communicative product, we will reconstruct a phased client brief and a creative concept and show the communicative properties of the advertising text as a specific communicative unit. We will supplement the analysis with the study of the infrastructure factor, which can sometimes result from the performer’s actions. Finally, we will illuminate the aspects of this particular piece of communication relevant to the theory and practice of advertising.

Thus, the methodology consists of five stages: the reconstruction of the client brief and creative concept; a structural and semantic analysis of the advertising text; a study of the influence of the channel, medium and the infrastructure entity – the performer (the developer and distributor of the analyzed advertising) on the nature and effectiveness of the communication being studied; and updating the theoretical and applied aspects of studying a specific text.

Findings

The proposed comprehensive methodology for analyzing an advertising text is extremely labor-intensive, but it allows the researcher to ensure a high degree of representativeness of the data obtained even when the analysis of the final communicative product does not provide an opportunity to find out the conditions that determine the content and form of advertising communication.

The author demonstrates ways of obtaining representative data from a client brief and a creative concept by analyzing the final communicative product – the advertising text; shows how to provide evidence at the level of structural-semantic analysis of the text; explains why it is important to identify the influence on the advertising text of relevant infrastructural factors; and points out what theoretical and practical observations are best suited to summarize the results of a comprehensive analysis

• Reconstruction of the client brief

The Association of Communication Agencies of Russia (ACAR) in October 2010 published the Brief template for the development of creative materials (hereinafter referred to as the Creative Brief) (Brif na razrabotku kreativnykh materialov). Technologically competent advertising communication begins with the preparation and analysis of this document. In this stage, answers to the basic questions who, what, who and how are formed and discussed. Since 2010, the document has not undergone any changes and still contains internal structural and logical contradictions, but remains the main content design model of the client creative brief.

Note that at the request of the “brief” the Unified State Information System for the Registration of Civil Purpose Research and Development Works shows only three research reports by keywords, with no results for creative brief (EGISU NIOKR).

This paper is not aimed at providing a comprehensive analysis of this document. Thus, we will focus on its main aspects.

The creative brief developed by ACAR is divided into four modules: the first is general information (here we will highlight the first positions – the client and the promotion object), the second is the content description of the object (the brand / product and its environment), the third is the systematization of ideas about the target audience (the consumer and their idea of the brand), and finally, the fourth is the design of the planned advertising campaign.

Knowing the structure and content of this document and based on the fact that ACAR is the leading organization for the advertising industry in Russia, we are entitled to consider any advertising text as created on the basis of this specification.

We reiterate that the lack of knowledge about the conditions that determined the nature of the advertising communication in question makes it impossible or very difficult to analyze any advertising text. On the other hand, the knowledge of technological procedures, reliance on model documents makes it possible with a high degree of probability to evaluate the development of a specific advertising text at different stages of its creation. This paper presents the results of this analysis.

At this stage of text analysis, we rely on the first three modules of the Creative Brief. And we start with the main thing – to explicate, attribute, and analyze the subject-object information in the text. Let us clarify the concepts used: the subject is the advertiser; the object is the product or service being promoted by advertising means. The Law on Advertising defines the object of promotion as a product, means of its individualization, a manufacturer or seller, a result of intellectual activity and an event (Federal’nyj zakon “O reklame”, 2019), an independent object is the image of a subject (the main attribute of image advertising).

While the information about the subject of communication may be absent in the text, the information about the object may be omitted only two cases: if it is teaser advertising or if it is communicatively flawed communication as the pragmatic nature of advertising communication and its value character exclude objectless content.

When working with subject-object information, the researcher needs mathematical accuracy, since the subject and the object of communication are represented in the text by the main marketing information, marked by corporate identity symbols, which are included in the company’s regulatory documents.

Quantitative and qualitative methods of analyzing the main marketing information – the subject and object identifiers in the text – allow us to assess the nature of communication: object-object, object-subject, or subject-object, using identified and accurately attributed signs of the company identification system.

A product category is rarely directly indicated in the text; therefore, information about the product category itself, a competitive environment, and market conditions is collected from open sources. First of all, the researcher turns to information coming from the company itself (the company website and official groups in social media), the second and third representative sources are analytical data, research results provided by specialized organizations from the advertising and related industries, and scholarly publications. An important aspect of the analysis can be the comparison of the analyzed text with the advertising background, a review of communications in the product category, a restored or reconstructed marketing and advertising history of the promoted object, and the nature of the advertising activity of the advertiser. In the advertising practice, such a review is called a competitor review.

The target audience portrait situation is more complicated. Perhaps because even in the Creative Brief itself, the emphasis is only on the psychographic portrait: who are these people, what do they think of the product now and how should their attitude to the product change after the advertising campaign? Work with this part of client marketing information is aggravated by the fact that the target audience does not have strict attributes as a subject or object would. Therefore, at this stage, again, according to open representative sources obtained as a result of research, the portrait of a potential typical target audience of a product category or a specific product is reconstructed.

An analysis of subject-object information, information about the market and the target audience, as well as advertising campaigns implemented by the company as a result of the work performed, allow us to formulate the intended goal of the campaign (it opens the fourth module of the Creative Brief as a task) and a client message (“What is the main idea we want to convey to the consumer”- this is how it is defined in the fourth module of the Creative Brief).

Reliance on strict identifiers of the subject and object in the advertising text, high-quality search and analytical work, reconstruction of the Creative Brief on the final communicative product provide a high degree of representativeness of the data obtained at this stage of working with the advertising text.

2) Analytical reconstruction of the creative concept

Partly, the content of the creative concept is indicated in the fourth module of the Creative Brief. It includes the goal of the advertising campaign and the main message; the reason to believe (“Why should a consumer believe the main message”); the tone of the advertising message; and mandatory elements and elements to avoid. However, there is no model of a creative concept in any advertising document in Russia.

Tim Collins offers a good introduction to creative advertising techniques in (Collins, 2014).

The universal part of the creative concept, consisting of five main components, can be represented as follows: an insight; the nature of advertising appeals; an advertising strategy; the specifics of the creative solution (the module type, the key image and verbal component for advertising of the verbal-visual or visual-verbal communication types; genre styling for advertising of the verbal type; genre-specific characteristics of the ad and a set of creative techniques for an ad of the audio-verbal or multimedia type); and the key message.

Important factors in the formation and justification of the creative concept include the proposed method of influencing the recipient, the connection of the method of influence to the task, the tone of the advertising message, as well as the tradition of promoting the product category, the history of the object, the advertising style of the company indicated in the Creative Brief, which was identified at the first stage of the analysis.

Based on this knowledge, when analyzing a specific text, we can provide a high degree of evidence of the proposed reconstruction of the creative concept implemented in the analyzed advertising text.

First, we formulate the insight implemented in the text, which was identified during the analysis of the text and based on the already analyzed client information; then we determine and justify the nature of the impact – rational or emotional; and finally, we move on to the analysis of the creative strategy. These are universal steps for all types of advertising components of the creative concept.

The examination of modular advertising includes an analysis of the communicative load of the key image, the nature of the verbal component, namely the structure of the header complex and the main advertising text (if any), and the type or types of an advertising module (if it is a series).

During the analytical reconstruction of the creative concept, we pay special attention to all the unique creative techniques and inventions identified in the advertising text.

The main goal of the second stage is to trace the connection between the creative concept and client information explicitly present in the text.

Since we focus on the formation of meta-competencies in advertising and public relations practitioners, especially at the master’s level, it is advisable for educational purposes to distinguish between client and key (aka advertising) messages, so that the researcher sees the difference between client and advertising information. The client message is made from the marketing information included in the client brief. In the analysis of the final communicative product the client message consists of subject-object information explicated from the advertising text and marketing information collected through research. This is a strictly constructed and maximally probative proposition formulated in a professional business style, grammatically corresponding to the nature of the information collected: if there is no subject information in the text (the subject is not indicated), then the client message is an impersonal or personal sentence (It is offered / We offer). The key message (advertising message) is the result of an adapted “translation” of marketing information from the client’s language into a language that is understandable to the target audience, in the form that most effectively achieves the goal set by the client. The professional community works with the latter type of message.

3) Structural and semantic analysis of the advertising text

Since the marketing content of advertising communication was an object of attention at the first stage and since the creative concept was already reconstructed at the second stage of the study, enough information had been collected to answer the main questions: how the analyzed advertising text is “made” and what is it as a communicative phenomenon.

The methodology of structural-semantic analysis of the advertising text has already been described in. Let us now turn to the concept of advertising text in more detail. When referring to an advertising text we mean four fundamentally different communicative phenomena – four communicative types. All advertising texts are united by the advertising information communicated by them. Advertising texts of the same communicative type are encodings of advertising information: verbal (this group includes the so-called editorial advertising content, published under the heading “advertising content”); verbal-visual and visual-verbal (these are two types of modular texts referred to in the professional jargon as a module letter or a module postcard; audio-verbal (radio advertising); and multimedia (video advertising).

Therefore, turning to the structural-semantic analysis of the text, we should determine which communicative type the studied advertising text belongs to and the signs of which communicative systems are used in it to encode marketing information (verbal material; word and visual-graphic signs, e.g., images, color, structural and compositional instrumentation of the text, fonts; words and audio signs – voice, sound and noise, music; a combination of characters of a different communicative nature, listed above as well as kinetic signs). After that, we should analyze the principles of organizing the communicative space at the structural and compositional levels of text analysis.

Speaking of advertising designs which includes adaptation of traditional cultural forms to the new communication environment, researchers distinguish between the design of printed texts and printed visuals; font design; advertising design related to the visualization of advertising concepts of the company; corporate design aimed at developing an effective visualization of brand ideas or a competitive corporate identity; web design which forms the visual information field of the company in the WWW (Aleksyutina, 2019).

Next, we should identify the similarity of the analyzed text with a particular genre-specific form of media texts or texts related to a different public and non-public sphere of communication (fiction and folklore, business correspondence genres, interpersonal communication speech genres, and gaming genre forms). Structural and semantic analysis of the text ends with the analysis of the communicated (about what), segmented (to whom) and acting (how) in the text (the communicative-functional level).

4) The infrastructure factor in advertising communication

At the previous stages, we considered the text and partly the context of advertising communication. Now we will focus on the imaginary or collective author, on which the nature and quality of advertising communication largely depends on, and which we almost do not think about when we consume this or that text.

The analysis of the communicative act involves, first of all, studying the factors of the sender (addresser) and the receiver (addressee), as well as attention to the message itself and its delivery method: “In ideal communication the received meaning of a message, and here we include an image as a message, would be identical to its intended meaning. In this instance we could say that sender and receiver are in perfect agreement as to meaning. But such an ideal state of affairs, as we know only too well in practice, is not always the case. We have already seen that the sender, as communicator/artist suffers some loss of intended meaning when committing thought into some material form. This can be confounded by a further loss when the image as message presents itself for interpretation which we can call it received meaning. This is particularly so in visual communication which is less standardized than the verbal” (Jamieson, 2007).

The subjects of advertising communication are the advertiser, advertising producer, advertising distributor and consumer. The advertising producer and the advertising distributor belong to the infrastructure of the advertising market, that is, they ensure the existence of advertising communication.

There is no single author in advertising; it is always a collective author. However, the factor of the advertising producer must not be underestimated. It would be very short-sighted and even unprofessional.

Therefore, based on the methodological principles of search work described above, we collect information about the actual producer of an advert (the rating position of the communication agency, its creative portfolio, analytical information about the campaign in open sources, company style – the recognizable style of the agency) and the advertising distributor. Sometimes the function of developing and placing advertising information is performed by one infrastructural entity.

Besides marketing information, the specific communicative properties of the channel and the media of advertising information should be studied as they strongly affect the nature and quality of communication.

5) Theoretical and applied aspects of the study of advertising text

There are many principles on which a typology of advertising activities can be based. Moving from the analysis of text and context to the study of the influence of subtext and intertext, it is necessary to put the analyzed object into a typological space, which would assign it to the type of advertising in terms of communication object (commercial, social, political, or image-making) and in terms of advertising channel (printed advertising or advertising in the print media; video advertising on the Internet or television advertising; radio advertising or audio advertising in the metro; and outdoor advertising or public transit advertising) and the information vehicle.

By systematizing the features of an advertising campaign identified at the first and fourth stages (its intensity, coverage, distribution, seasonality, etc.), i.e. everything we managed to collect from open sources, we get a unique opportunity to supplement the analysis of a specific text with the study of different types of intertextual links. The first objective is to characterize advertising text variants within a single advertising campaign (horizontal connections), check the consistency of the implementation of the creative concept, and trace the interaction of texts within this advertising campaign. The second objective is to compare the studied source with the examples of its advertising history identified in the first stage. By this we mean evolutionary connections, which imply changes, system properties and characteristics of the advertising history of the product as an object of promotion, taking into account the advertising policy of the company. The third objective is to compare the communications of different entities within the same product category, the structure of the creative concept being the basis of the comparative analysis.

Finally, the analyzed text can give rise to considerations of the need for ethical and legal regulation. A.V. Karyagina shows in his research that the creativity of advertising activity can be both constructive and destructive in nature (Karyagina, 2017). An example could be using fine art texts as pre-texts, adapting cultural meanings to a mass audience, reducing them, profiling cultural values, and sometimes replacing spiritual values with material ones, advertising provokes a negative reaction from the consumer, which weakens the position of the company and reduces the effectiveness of advertising communication (Stepanova, 2014). As already noted, advertising is often blamed for violating the visual and wider communicative ecology (the ecology of the communicative environment).

As a result. Only knowledge of technological procedures protects the researcher from fantasy and conjecture. Nothing can be attributed to an advertising text, but one must be able to “read” all levels of its meaning.

Conclusion

Advertising textual studies is a young and dynamically developing research field. Theses are being defended; articles and monographs are being published. Therefore, it is vitally important to develop methodological principles of studying the object of study in this area of science. This implies an in-depth knowledge of advertising, the nature of marketing communications, the advertising text as a communicative phenomenon (with its pragmatic goal-setting and cost values). The author has devoted almost thirty years to this work. But each new stage of research of the advertising text has allowed her to discover something new in the studied object. With each new study, we are able to expand the boundaries, go beyond the text and offer a new, systematic approach to the study of advertising communication.

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