The Semiotics of Visual Communication in Print Advertisements : How to Read between the Lines

Advertising being a study of human behavior and responses is subject to unpredictability and lack of clear answers. Its answers are at best probabilistic and never ever universal truths. As advertising is a lot about strong images and perceptions, the intensity of the imagery is quite understandable. Apart from the intense imagery, advertising also generates a lot of heated debates and "opinions‟ among people…Yet , opinions, likes and dislikes on ads will keep coming from all corners because having opinions and expressing them is part and parcel of being human. The subjectivity of such opinions will also continue. After all advertising is seen and felt by most of us in our 'personal‟ domain' what we can identify with (what we like) and what we cannot (what we don't like) (Tiwari Sanjay 2003). The current paper seeks to find how the visual messages are formed and given meaning through the semiotic analysis of the advertisements. The practitioners of semiotic school believe that the meanings of pictures are not in the pictures, but rather in what we bring to them. Since visual interpretation is based upon perception through cognition and language and is affected by social, cultural, and personal frames, we strongly believe that semiotics will help us explain the complexity of visual communication while processing visual information and producing meaning from the advertisements. This concept of semiotic is the major force of the present paper. The primary goal is to establish the underlying conventions, identifying significant differences and oppositions in an attempt to model the system of categories, relations (syntagmatic and paradigmatic), connotations, distinctions and rules of combination employed