The Semiotics of Advertising by R. Barthes

The article considers the approach of the French semiotic R. Barth to the study of an advertising message. According to Barth, text analysis makes it possible to bring the structure of the message into motion and identify those forms through which the meaning of the text manifests and changes. Noting that the ordinary idea of advertising does not grasp all the many meanings contained in an advertising message, he highlights some practices of reading and interpreting it. Comparing advertising with a cultural gesture, Barth emphasizes the polyvalence of the signifier in the advertising message. At the same time, he gives a typology of the images (plots) of the advertising message. The use of structural analysis will allow the French semiotics to consider the correlation of the visual and verbal code on the example of an advertising message, to reveal the mechanisms of ideological influence in visual images, to identify the signifying mechanisms of ideology. In the modern culture of mass replication of visual images, the tools of the Bart analysis of advertising have not lost their relevance. In general, the practices of reading and interpreting the visual image, highlighted by R. Barth, can become material for the development of new communicative models, or, as R. Barth himself wrote, “productivity points” that allow us to advance modern research.