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The mobile phone is an everyday appliance that a majority of people in the United Kingdom and the rest of the world are familiar with. People with mobile phones are very rarely found without them and sometimes say that they couldn’t live without them. Advertising for mobile phones makes them out as the must have, the accessory made out as a necessity, having a mobile phone will change your life for the better, buy owning a mobile phone you will become extremely popular, have many friends and a great social life and because you have your mobile phone organising your rich social life will be easy. recent advertisements for the Carphone Warehouse have tried to get listeners to sympathise with the mobile phones. Each advertisement features a different mobile phone with its own identity and personality; the mobile phone is portrayed as a small vulnerable ‘person’ who needs care, attention, love happiness and security. In this advertisement the Carphone Warehouse are trying to advertise the fact that they now offer all six mobile phone networks by using a ‘mobile phone’ and an ‘everyday bloke’, but there are many meanings within this advertisement. To break down the meanings that are in this advertisement and discover as many of these meanings as possible, semiotics is the method that will be used.
Semiotics, which is also called semiology, is the study of signs and symbols within text and language, and how these signs and symbols come to have significance or meaning. Semiotics allows us to break down language and text that is used in this case to promote and sell a product, and look for the different meanings and how they are significant to different individuals. With each individual finding a different meaning to any advertisement, it is not always possible to control the message of the medium; the meaning is only really controlled by the individuals’ perception. The perception of the meanings will depend on where the person is geographically situated, their social placing for example working class, middle class and their cultural orientation and background. Semiotics serves as a useful set of tools for identifying many of the formal patterns that work to make meaning in many aspects of our culture, particularly the media. There are a number of terms that are used in semiotics that help to explain what certain meanings are and how it is that people can derive these meanings. (www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/semiotics_and_ads/introduction.html) ‘The basic unit of meaning in semiotics is a ‘sign’ in Saussure’s version of semiotics, a sign is anything that makes meaning or can be used to communicate a meaning, yet Umberto Eco’s formulation says ‘a sign is anything that can be used to tell a lie.’ The sign is made up of the ‘signifier’ and the ‘signified’, www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/semiotics_and_ads/introduction.html
‘the signifier is any material thing that signifies for example the words on a page, tone of voice you speak in, the words you use when your communicating with others and the signified is the concept that a signifier refers to’. Two other commonly used semiotic terms are ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’, www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/semiotics_and_ads/introduction.html
‘a denotation is most basic or literal meaning of a sign for example the word ‘rose’ signifies a particular kind of flower, a connotation is the secondary, cultural meaning of signs or ‘signifying signs’, these are signs that are used as signifiers for a secondary meaning for example the word ‘rose’ signifies passion.’ By using these terms and others (as shown in Semiotic Terminology Appendix 1) the Carphone Warehouse advertisement can be broken down and analysed.
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The first factor in breaking down this advertisement to be semiologically analysed would be the analysis of the voices used, how many of them there are and how they can be distinguished from others on the advert. The first voice you hear on the advertisement is the lead/ presenters voice, this voice is very likely to draw your attention immediately because of the accent the lead/ presenters voice has an accent that could be considered as a foreign accent, as it is not an accent from the united kingdom, this voice has an Irish accent which sound like it is an accent from the Eastern part of the Republic of Ireland. This accent on the radio in the United Kingdom is not something that listeners would normally hear on the radio. Most voice-overs on adverts are done by people from England who have a slight trace of an accent or no accent at all, so the Irish accent being used is going to grab your attention, by doing this you are more likely to actually stop and listen to the advertisement.
The advertisement sounds as if there are two people who speak, when the two voices belong to one person, but he takes on two roles in the advertisement, these roles are the lead/presenters, who is the presenter of the information that the advertisement has to offer or in the context of the advertisement, he is the owner of the mobile phone, and the minor voice, which has no role of presenting information in the advertisement but does question the information in the advertisement on behalf of the listeners. Within these two roles there is a contrast in the characters, and the tones of voice. The first voice, the lead/ presenters voice is friendly and familiar, this voice is strong without being overpowering, and the voice suggests that the person is an authority figure. The character is informative and intelligent which means that he is educated, one of the possible meanings of this is that this character is a reflection of the minority of the population listening to the advert, this is saying that very few people will know anything about the things being said in the advert. The lead voice speaks in a manner that most people would use in normal conversation, his speech seems to be directed at you as an individual not to all listeners of the advertisement. He speaks quite quickly but slow enough to get across the information that the listeners need and at the same time he sounds confident. Later on in the advert the voice that the character uses changes completely, it becomes aggressive and snappy, this change in the voice is when the character becomes annoyed with the mobile phone’s constant questioning the character seems to loose his temper and his answer to the mobile phone is very sharp; he has gone from friendly and laid back to sharp and aggressive.
The second voice, the mobile phone’s tone of voice is smaller like a child’s voice and squeaky in comparison to the lead voice and the way the character speaks is slightly drawn out, this could be interpreted as the character being uneducated and unaware of many things in the world. One of the possible meanings of this is that the character is a reflection on a majority of the population who are listening to the advert and the advert is there to educate them. The voice used for the minor voice, the mobile phone, never seems to communicate directly to the listener; he directs all his speech to the lead voice, the mobile phone’s owner, which could possibly mean that the mobile phone is unaware of the listeners. The tone of voice of the mobile phone seems more to be an impersonating voice it sound like a voice a child or an adult would use to mimic a child or someone that they would consider to be dense. This tone of voice us patronizing, and if you consider one possible meaning of the mobile phone reflecting a majority of the listeners, then the voice is patronizing to this majority of people. The tone of voice is suggestive of the mobile phone being dense, in which case it is also suggesting that the listeners are also being considered as dense.
The second factor of breaking down this advertisement to be semiologically analysed, is to look at the words used within the advert and selecting the sections and words within the advert that have hidden meanings. Throughout the advert there are many words and sections of text that have different and hidden meanings when they are analysed using semiotics, parts of the advert have been selected to be analysed in-depth. In the advert some of the words are used more than once but the meanings that are found remain the same throughout the advert, while some will change because they are put into context. The very first line of the advert has more possible meanings than the rest of the advert has collectively, and many of the words used that have hidden meanings in the first line are use again up to five times in the rest of the advert.
The first word in this advert is ‘Mobly’ which becomes apparent through the advert is actually the name of the mobile phone, however ‘Mobly’ doesn’t just have a name he also has a personality. By naming the mobile phone, it has been given an identity which is basically humanising an inanimate object, and in doing so the listener isn’t really going to think of ‘Mobly’ as a mobile phone, pieces of plastic and electronic chip board that you would carry around and use it when you need it, the mobile phones becomes a ‘thing’ with a name, he becomes in theory a person, he speaks, he thinks and he wants to learn. These qualities come clear through the advert and there are words used that would validate his personality and identity, words like ‘little fella’ and ‘inquisitive’. The words ‘little fella’ are two important words in ‘Mobly’s’ identity; firstly the word fella states that ‘Mobly’ is a male, but the word ‘little’ is more important in Mobly’s identity because the of the connotations of the word ‘little’. Some of the connotations of the word little are youth, small, childlike, naïve, simple and innocent, most of these point toward Mobly being a child and the word ‘inquisitive’ reinforces the possibility of Mobly being a child, because children learn most by questioning what is going on around them and what is being said to them. With Mobly possibly being a child it is also possible for the relationship between Mobly and his owner being symbolic of a parent/ adult and child relationship, the owner acts as a parent or adult figure by providing information for Mobly to learn and Mobly questions the information in an attempt to learn more. The idea of Mobly having a personality and an identity makes him easier to relate to and so the listeners are more likely to feel sympathetic to him than they would be if they still thought of him as pieces of plastic and electronic chipboards.
The next word that can be looked at in-depth is the word virgin; this word appears in the first line and also in Mobly’s questioning of the word, and also after this point. The word virgin in the first two lines of text is polysemic, meaning it is ‘capable of having a range of possible meanings and this range of meanings is narrowed down by the context of the advert’ (www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/media/efterms.html). One of the possible meanings of the use of the word virgin without a context is that the advert is making a statement about how society sees virgins, society seems to view virgins and virginity as if it is an illness, something that has to be cured and changed, and this makes you think that it is possibly the point of view of the mobile phone owner. In the dictionary the explanation of the word virgin is ‘virgin person (especially a woman) who has never had sexual intercourse.’ This explanation of the word is the denotation of the word, its basic and literal meaning, yet the words from the dictionary explanation give some context to the advert, the words ‘especially a woman’ give the word a different meaning, as Mobly is confirmed as a male, when his identity is validated, by the use of the word ‘fella’, the word virgin may not even apply to him. A possible reading of the meaning of the word virgin in the dictionary is that Mobly is male then he is not really a virgin, because the ‘person’ who is a virgin is ‘especially a woman’. Yet if Mobly was a female then the meanings that can be read from this advert would change completely, so by changing one detail in the text, the sex changes and the context remains the same, yet the meaning to one word changes the meanings within the advert. Examples of how the meanings are changed are instead of the contrast of voices used in the advert being taken as a child and parent/adult; with a female as Mobly it could be a dominating husband/boyfriend and wife/girlfriend. The tone in which Mobly is spoken to could be seen as mocking and insulting instead of sympathetic. This is society looking down on virgins, like it’s a bad thing to be. The advert does exactly that but then tries to make out that a ‘Virgin Mobile’ is a good thing to have. This change in meanings is because the word has been put into context. Although the word still has sexual connotations, but it now becomes a signifier when it is put with the word mobile, then Virgin Mobile is a signifier which signifies the competition between businesses in today’s society, in this case it specifically signifies the competition between the different mobile phone networks that operate in the United Kingdom, the aim of each one of the networks is to become the de facto standard mobile phone network. A definition of a de facto standard is ‘A de facto standard is a product or a business that depend on communications or collaborations between different organisations, much of the products or businesses value come from its widespread acceptance’ (Heathcote, P.M., 18 pg ), so a de facto standard can only be created by a particular product or a business dominating the market that it competes in. In the case of this advert there are two businesses competing to be the de facto standard in their own markets, Virgin mobile in the mobile phone networks market and The Carphone Warehouse in the mobile phone supplier market.
It seems that the main objective of the advertisers here is clearly to associate the Carphone warehouse with a freedom of choice and a freedom in life, mobile phones, live your life but stay connected to all that you need. While on a subconscious level they are trying to make the listeners think about how society looks at certain subjects such as virgins, the relationships between parents and children, how speech and tone of voice can mean something different if we change the context of what we say and also how modern day society is competing with itself to see what part of society is going to win, by businesses fighting with each other in an attempt to control their markets. Semiotics is a complex system of interpretation and can be used in different ways by different people. What a teenager might interpret in this advert, a sixty year old may not agree with. It is all about the individual’s perception.
Script for Carphone Warehouse Advert
Advert Virgin mobile at the Carphone Warehouse
Duration Thirty-nine seconds
Presenter
Mobly, the little mobile phone I bought this week from the Carphone warehouse is a Virgin, aren’t you little fella?
Mobly
What’s a Virgin?
Presenter
It’s a kinda mobile phone network called Virgin mobile that you can now also buy at the Carphone Warehouse.
Mobly
What’s a warehouse?
Presenter
Which means that the Carphone Warehouse now offers all six mobile phone networks the only place that does in the UK
Mobly
What’s a UK?
Presenter
Virgin mobile now available at the Carphone Warehouse
Jingle - Shed seven Get yourself connected
Presenter
For a better mobile life visit you’re nearest store or carphonewarehouse.com
Mobly
What’s a store?
Presenter
It’s a place! Where they smash inquisitive little mobile phones into bits, loads of little smashy bits!
Mobly
Oh
References
Heathcote P.M. (18) page ‘A’ Level Information Technology, Payne Gallway Publishers London
The Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford, (16)
www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/semiotics_and_ads/introduction.html , September 001
www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/media/efterms.html, November 001
Further Reading
Berger A.A., (18) Media Analysis Techniques, nd Edition, SAGE Publication, London
Inglis F., (10) Media Theory An Introduction, Basil Blackwell Ltd, Oxford
Bignell J., (17) Media Semiotics An Introduction, Manchester University Press, Manchester
www.aber.ac.uk/media/documents/s4b/semiotics.html , September 001
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