Multimodality in Safaricom Advertisement Communication in the Kenyan Daily Nation Newspaper

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 study examined how language co-occurs with the other semiotic forms as used in Safaricom advertisements. The study examined how the visual texts in Safaricom newspaper advertisements impact on the audience's purchasing decisions, analyzed how visual semiotics and written language were used in the Safaricom advertisements to aid meaning interpretation and determined the impact of using the visual images and written language on the audience's ability to interpret the messages. The data analysis was based on Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) a theoretical framework by Kress and Van Leeuwen.

A Multimodal Semiotic Analysis of Digital Advertisements

“…Multimodality is an approach that deals with the meaning made by using several modes of communication other than language. It is the source or means of describing a practice and representation in all semiotics complexity and richness (Adams, Matu & Oketch, 2014). Multimodality involves semiotics such as image, gesture etc.…”

“…(Iedema, 2003cited in Adams et al 2014). Kress and Van Leeuwen are considered as the pioneers of developing Multimodal Discourse Analysis (Adams et al 2014).…”

“…It is a theory which looked at many different modes that people used to communicate with each other and to express themselves (Kress, 2009). It offers a way to examine how language and image work together (cited in Adams et al 2014): Thus, multimodality provides us a source of investigating semiotics such as image, gesture, text-based messages etc. It mainly focuses on studying the interrelationships between various communicative modes; visual or auditory, words or image.…”

A Stylistic Analysis of Advertising Discourse: A Case Study of Coke Commercial Advertisement

“…With regard to advertising, the advertisers employ any words or concepts that will pique the interest of the audience in the subject matter or product. According to Adams et al (2014), an advertiser's goal is to provide meaning to a product by creating associations in the reader's or listener's mind and encouraging them to purchase it. Advertising language is a persuasive language that is influenced by culture and contains straightforward statements, brief indirect sentences, and sentence fragments with unique emphasis and association values according to Jafari and Mahadi (2014).…”

Stylistics Analysis in Advertising Discourse: A Case of the Dangote Cement Advertisement in Bamenda- Cameroon

“…For the people to engage in the process of interpreting, the advert has a tie with the culture of the people, that is, the things they are engaged in, daily. This view is expressed by Adams et al (2014) saying an advertiser's intention is to give meaning to a product by developing associations in the mind of the reader or listener and persuading them to buy it. They go on to emphasis that these associations are cultural in the sense that any member of the culture for which the advertisement is produced will find them easy to recognize.…”