Semiotic Discussion of Safaricom Newspaper Advertisements

Abstract

Advertising is a form of communication which has one main function: to make the audience buy the advertised product or subscribe to the services displayed. Consumer advertisements employ more than one mode of communication in designing messages that target their audiences. This often causes interpretational difficulties to the target audiences. This paper strives to examine how visual semiotics and written language are used in the Safaricom newspapers advertisements to aid meaning/ interpretation, and to determine the impact of using the visual images and written language on the audience's ability to interpret the messages. The data analysis is based on Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA), a theoretical framework by Kress and Van Leeuwen. The data is drawn from the telephony sector in Kenya. This paper concludes that most viewers encounter difficulties in comprehending visual images in isolation and have to rely on written language to fully understand the message.