Abstract

This study examines the persuasive and appealing multi-modes created in advertisements by advertisers, as well as how they convince and affect viewers and buyers. This research focuses on the signs, symbols, and multimodality. For this purpose, Multi-modal Discourse Analysis (MDA) of Kress & Leeuwen, (1996) is employed as a framework in order to analyze the advertisements. There are three basic functions namely compositional, interactional, and representational that affect the other components in the photos in a certain way. Moreover, Random sampling technique is used to collect the data for this study. The collected data is analyzed in terms of semiotics and multimodality and it has focused on the font size, boldness, and capitalization that is used in the selected advertisements. The findings give customers an insight into the advertising strategies used by the advertising agencies. 

Key Words

Advertisements, Multi-Modal Discourse Analysis (MDA), Meta-Functions, Visuals

Introduction:

Background 

Humans use a variety of ways to communicate messages, such as speech, announcements, signs or symbols, advertisements, and so on. One way to convey a message that is vital for explaining the advantages of a product is through advertisements (Denti, K. (2024). A product, a brand, or a service is promoted to the media through an advertisement where the admin makes use of persuasive language, colors, sounds, and music to attract interest, engagement, and sales. Advertisements are considered important in the digital world because they make use of such language and build the image ideology of products. The main focus of this study is how language can affect perception, behavior, attitude, and point of view and can persuade people.

Language is used to explain things and to show or instruct how to display commodities, services, items, and other things in such a way that the viewer feels the taste and smell through the colors and persuasive content used in the advertisements (Jamil & Adil, 2024).  

In this age, the role of advertising is very important and should not be taken for granted. Since advertising is made to tell the public about new goods and services, it is a method of expanding business. It calls our attention to many societal problems. We can see that many people are so influenced that they buy so many unnecessary things. This is the reason how the companies convey their message in a subtle way which convinces the consumers to buy a certain product by their own will. Ancient Egyptians successfully communicated in the form of pictographs or hieroglyphics to visually represent an idea, activity, or object? (Patton, 2020, p. 125). Rutledge (2020, p. 71) has even said that ? the use of visual information pre-dates the development of alphabets and word-based communication systems.

As cited by Janson (2011) "Printed and spoken texts, pictures, gestures, sounds and objects are all considered to be signs. Semiotic theory studies signs which include written words, ads, logos, and films. In this article, we are trying to demonstrate how semiotics is used to reveal concealed meanings in advertisements. 

Moreover, there are two main parts to promoting a product. One is explaining the goods to be advertised and sold and the other one is rating it favorably to persuade the reader to buy it because the intention of the person who is writing the advertisement is to design the advertisement in a persuasive manner. We see that more often neutral persuasive techniques are used in advertisements that respect every consumer's choice (Xing & Feng, 2023).

Thus, these advertisements are argumentative in nature because persuasion requires a variety of particular verbal strategies. Now, persuasion is a technique of linguistics where, without directly forcing any views on the audience, language methods are used to affect viewer attitudes and elicit responses. This shows that the media has persuasive power and they can use language in such a way that can manipulate people's minds. Our main aim of this research is basically to show the persuasive power of advertisements to persuade people into purchasing a product. It is done through the use of various persuasive techniques and multimodality because a well-organized advertisement makes us experience all kinds of emotions. These advertisements are persuasive also because there is an art form and they showcase the latest trends in their design, music tradition culture, etc. 




Statement of Purpose

The research tends to analyze two different advertisements from the point of view of modes. It is a way of developing business because advertisements are created to inform people about goods and other products. We can see that many people are so influenced that they buy so many unnecessary things. This is the reason how the companies convey their message in a subtle way which convinces the consumers to buy a certain product by their own will.

This research focuses on the choice of words and multimodality that is involved in semiotics such as images and gestures used in advertisements, and how these elements are used to persuade people.




Research Questions

1- How is the language used for persuasion in advertisements?

2- How does multimodality construct certain ideologies and awareness in the viewers?

Objectives of the Study

1. To understand how visual language is enough to manipulate someone.

2. To highlight the importance of different forms of communication i.e. written, spoken, images, or gestures. 

3. To highlight the word choices on the basis of social and cultural values which initiate the desire for any product or food item. 




Significance of the Study

Persuasive language and semiotics not only describe the product in the best possible way but also show how it is significant for the hypnotization of the viewers. This study will show the power of language. It will help the readers to find the hidden meanings, the choice of words, use of colors, and sounds and help them understand all about persuasion.

Literature Review

Literature Review

Introduction

The advertising language is different in different aspects from the language used in daily life. It is that kind of language that includes diction and expression and also possesses persuading power which has a great impact on the audience and their lifestyle. This Literature review consists of some relatable works that studied different aspects of Advertisements. The advertising language is a kind of social communication that tries to persuade people, develop trust in them, and aims to inform people.  

However, the objective of this research is to gather the linguistic data required to convey persuasion in advertising. Advertisements are considered important in the digital world because they make use of such language and build the image ideology of products. The main focus of this study is how language can affect perception, behavior, attitude, and point of view and can persuade people. 




Literature Review

Persuasive languages have advantages and strengths in influencing the public to achieve goals. Therefore, people use persuasive language widely in various communication events (Farhan, F. B., Revita, I., & Oktavianus, O. (2024). Aristotle (1926) noticed that people try to persuade one another by using several techniques among those different techniques they use three main tactics that are ETHOS, PATHOS, and LOGOS. He called these tactics Ethos which means persuasion by moral character, Logos means persuasion by the speech itself, and pathos means persuasion by putting the hearer into an emotional state of mind. Ethos or ethical appeal is often conveyed through the tone and style of the message. Another emotional appeal about feelings is called pathos. If you want someone to agree with you on something it means you want them to have positive feelings towards you. So, the speaker needs more persuasive power in convincing people which helps the audience to feel in the same manner as you do. When your theory or argument is reasonable, it makes you think about it carefully, and there are many solid reasons to believe as you do and that there is evidence that supports what you say. 

Hatim (1990) stated that “In terms of text-typology, the advertising appears to be best represented as a continuous series in which events are adjacently placed and are not perceptibly different from each other the text functions are shifting between ‘informing’ and ‘manipulating’.” Therefore, promotional genres often consist of two primary parts: a description of the thing to be marketed and an evaluation of that product that will persuade the reader to buy it.

Moreover, Fuertes-Olivera et al. (2001) and Janoschka (2004) noted that there are several elements of persuasive language employed in commercials, including alliteration, commands, or rhetorical questions. The persuasive power of images is analyzed here which shows how the images, signs, and symbols tend to be very stronger than spoken language. The reason is that people 'believe their own eyes' more than listening to others. Thus, persuasive images have the tendency to create meanings. These meanings are ideational which means that they make meaning in a certain arranged manner because it is based on the arrangement of the image's components in relationship to each other. Now coming towards the interpersonal meaning, it tells us how the viewer perceives certain images. By this, we indicate the relationship of the viewer that he/she is a participant. Thus, via the interplay of both the words and the visuals, interpersonal and ideational meanings are produced. An image conveys the message in a lucid manner mostly and shows whoever the statements are ascribed to and to whom they are intended.

Adami (2013) suggested that "Emotional engagement is the most important part which needs various linguistics devices to fulfill the targeted aim. To make an ad attractive and persuasive in terms of emotions one should make use of the right language, thoughts, and imagination. We have some technical terms as Ethos, Logos, and Pathos which are supposed to be used in ad making. However, Ethos, pathos, and logos are also used as persuasive techniques. When the credibility is established and an ad has reasons with evidence it holds more power in convincing people and helps the audience feel the same way as you do. In this way, one can be sure that the work is worthy enough to awaken the desire of viewers to buy a product. If you are the speaker and you have the schema of the ad techniques then it is easy to understand that persuasive appeals give you a toolbox on how to persuade people. And if you are the audience being aware of these techniques so they help you to understand when people try to use them on you.

Bhatia (2014) pointed out that the system of language not only revolves around the meanings of an oral or written text, but it is also concerned with all social systems of certain cultures in society. Language also appears as a symbol system in human culture and we use sign language in our daily lives as well. For instance, the clothes or the food menu, ritual, and other such things are concerned and are reflections of the concerned culture. Language is an ultimate power that not only is used for the purpose of communication but also has a great impact on every entity of the surroundings. 

Adami (2013) that looking at the pattern, style, and technique we can see that an advertisement, in the aspect of language, is quite different from other types of text. Language used in advertisements is innovative and creative which aims to attract an audience and catch their attention. This knowledge of advertising language is extremely important because the competitors compete with each other and obtain the customers' attention which is the main aim of the creators.

Ranjbarian et al., (2011) focused on another aspect of persuasion which is branding. Most people while buying something have encountered such situations in which they cannot choose between two products. So, the individual would go for that product which has a popular brand. It is because all such popular brands have stimulated their thinking in surprising and unexpected ways. Advertisements are important because they have the tendency to build a favorable attitude toward a brand. It works in a way that it transfers effect from the ad to the brand and the ad affects the viewers and their thoughts. We can see that the companies spread awareness to customers about a certain brand by creating attractive images and using certain persuasive words and language. Advertisements are done for brand awareness and for the purpose of letting people know about the brand quality in this way the companies achieve their goal and persuade consumers to buy their products. The only thing that is needed is to try to spot the persuasive techniques keeping the perceptions of people in mind an ad creator will strive to make each ad more convincing, memorable, and enough curious that the viewers would like to try that certain item or product. Texts, Slogans, characters, and sounds are all part of persuasive techniques. The creators make use of certain characters which are more followed by the people. As they appear in the ad they have a great impact on the thoughts and perceptions of people because they are someone who is chosen from the targeted audience themselves and the viewers are highly inspired by them. This is an important part of making an ad because choosing a person who is famous among a group of people definitely is followed by those people and everyone tries to be like their role models. These characters are the people whom they are likely to admire namely, celebrities or cartoon characters. Except this, if we look at certain ads they make use of "emotions" and try to connect things with daily life where their appeal is to audiences' sentiments or logic. Most of the commercials show humorous scenes among friends or strong bonds and relationships among siblings etc. to achieve a certain goal. 

Metsamaki (2012) also called these qualities as communication tools because ethos is used for trust and constructive competence. Therefore, logos appear to be an important appeal that shows the internal reliability or homogeneity of thoughts that build chains of reasons supporting all the arguments. Lastly, we have Pathos which is an appeal to emotions. It is used to access one's feelings, sentiments, and thoughts. If a creator wants the viewers to agree on what he thinks about certain things that should be felt by the viewers and expect a positive feeling from them so, he makes the use of Pathos.

The literature review discussed above gave us the idea that numerous critics have worked on different advertisements and discussed one or another side of multimodality and persuasive language. It was necessary to look into the aforementioned works in the context of multiple scholars. On the basis of the above studies, it is concluded that language is a powerful tool that is used in advertisements and other genres to convince people and to portray certain ideologies.

Research Methodology and Theoretical Framework:

Research Methodology 

The researcher collected two advertisements from different sites which were analyzed with the help of multi-modal discourse analysis. The advertisements after their selection are then analyzed using the meta functions given by Kress & Leeuwen (1996).




Delimitation of Study

Due to the scarcity of time, this study is delimited to two online advertisements. The researcher has collected data from two different online websites.

Theoretical Framework

The Multimodal theory of Kress and Leeuwen (1996) is used as a theoretical framework for this investigation. They contended that 'multimodality' is a concept that refers to many different sorts of modes in human communication, including visual, auditory, oral, written, and spatial modes (1996, 2003; referenced in Pan, 2015, p. 206). Halliday's social semiotic theory is the foundation of Kress & Leeuwen's social semiotic method.  The study of the system of signs is known as semiotics. It demonstrates how words/signs convey meanings since everything that represents something else except itself is a sign. By using this idea, Kress and Leeuwen demonstrate how the semiotic framework created a social connection between the speaker and the listener. Language is a system and a way to carry out some Meta functions claims Halliday (1978). The study of additional forms of communication, such as gestures, text-based images, messages, etc., is made possible by multimodality.

Here, I concluded that by applying the three Meta-functions we can get the required meaning which is composition, interactional, or representational. In short, the information provided allows the researcher to analyze the meanings sent by various semiotic text modes (color, font, layout, writing, etc.). i.e. representational, interactional, and compositional.

Data Analysis:

Introduction

In this section, advertisements are analyzed on the basis of their different modes such as font, color, written text, music, etc. There are several meanings hidden in it because advertisements consist of images and images are all about meanings. Visual images, spoken words, and written text fulfill different cohesive functions and help in developing meaning.  

A message conveyed through images is more powerful because the brain captures visual information faster than words (Olowu & Akinkurolere, 2015). This part of the research tends to investigate how images are more powerful than words. 

Thus, an image therefore is considered more effective than written or spoken words. According to Kumar, Jha, Gupta, Aggarwal, Garg, Malyan, & Chen (2023), an image not only is a visual depiction of something but is created in such a way that reflects the culture, self-image, personality, design, brand idea. Following is the data analyzed using Meta-functions.

Figure 1



Visual Analysis

In the above picture, the first noticeable thing is the comparison between the two sides of the picture. The product is displayed on the right side of the picture which is an anti-aging cream. On the top left side of the picture, a sentence is written "Anti-Winkle Best Anti-Ageing Cream for 30-year-olds" in bold letters. The purpose of writing the sentence in such a style is to attract the attention of the viewers. In this way, the writing becomes more prominent. The sentence is not attractive only due to the boldness but the words used are quite loaded. Additionally, the color of the cream container is also eye-catching which is having a silver shining lid and a red container. The product's name also appears in capital bold characters on the container. The purpose of using such dark and shiny colors is to lay emphasis on the product. 




Representational Meaning 

The representational meaning of an image has two types known as narrative and conceptual pictures (Liu, 2013, p. 1260). The main focus of the picture is on the two sides of the face. On the basis of the narrative meaning of the image, the clear and wrinkled sides of the same face are used as the theme of the advertisement. There is a difference observed on both sides of the face which shows the effect of the product/cream on the wrinkled skin and turns it into firm skin. It means one picture has been classified into two on the basis of some difference. This is done intentionally in the same picture to show the very effect or result of the cream. The picture also symbolizes the shiny face and the red color symbolizes the brightness and glow in the skin after using the product.




Interactional Meaning 

According to Liu (2013), the interactional meaning of an image has three aspects that are distance, contact, and attitude. The contact in this image with the viewer is created through the direct eye contact of the woman whose face has two sides with a clear difference. The purpose of dividing the face into two parts is to grasp the attention in such a way that the effect of the product is emphasized perfectly before and after using it. Now if we see it from the social distance perspective then these two sides represent that the woman in the image is near to the audience because she is one of those people who are having such skin problems. Moreover, the overall bright environment which is the red background is also of great importance.




Compositional Meaning 

According to Liu (2013), compositional meaning also has three parts: salience, value, and framing. The value shows where an element is placed in the image. The picture of the woman is placed at the center and the product is placed at the right side of the cured face. This placement is done in such a way that enhances the beauty of the ad because everything is arranged perfectly. There is a detail given on the left side under the sentence in bold letters. This shows the flow of information from old to new. This also indicates the effect of the product which appears as a new thing in the image for the viewers. Hence the audience realizes the effect of the product and conveys its message in a way that wrinkled skin can be cured by using OLAY products.

Figure 2



Visual Analysis

This image has two Domino's pizzas which are placed together. An appealing large label with yellow, white, and red writing may be observed. 'BUY 1 GET ONE FREE' is written in capital big letters. The multi-modal features, such as the colors utilized, the written content in strong and capital letters, the appealing cheesy pizzas, and all of these modes, provide additional meanings that are interrelated. The colors red, yellow, and white are chosen on the label because red is a brilliant, powerful color, while yellow causes desire and hunger, and this rapidly grabs the attention of onlookers. The purpose of using such colors is to affect our bodies and stimulate hunger in us. In addition, an offer of one free pizza is intentionally written in bold and capital letters to attract the viewers' attention. The purpose of using such a sentence is to lure the people. It is a good offer for everyone because it is like killing two birds with one stone, so one can buy two pizzas for the price of one. Hence everyone would like to save some money.




Representational Meaning 

This picture, according to the narrative process, has the label ('BUY 1 GET ONE FREE') in red, yellow, and white colors. The image has two things (the pizzas) that belong to the same category, which is food. This immediately catches the attention of the viewers because having two such pizzas for the price of one is a genuine offer. It refers to the promotional deal related to the marketed culinary item. All of the graphic components depict the delicious pizzas and the discount offer.




Interactional Meaning 

The highlighted label with the text 'BUY 1 GET ONE FREE' creates contact with the viewer in this graphic since it is the first observable object in the image that draws the audience's attention. If we look at the image from the contact point, we can see that the food advertised has nearly completely covered the visual, which is extremely prominent and exhibited well and is close to the viewers. The colors in the image transmit powerful connotations, for example, the red color is conspicuous and enticing, indicating that the ad is perking the customers, and these modes are crucial from an attitude standpoint. 




Compositional Meaning 

As the value indicates the positioning of the promoted item, it is all about the right placement of the primary product and other aspects. So, the Pizzas shown in the above picture are placed in such a way that covers the whole image which indicates that the food is enough tasty to buy. The phrases are placed along the pizzas BUY 1 GET ONE FREE, a piece of information is given which says 'Medium Classic Deals Online', and elements are placed in an arranged manner.

Conclusion:

Introduction

In this research report two advertisement visuals are analyzed in the light of the Meta-functions of Kress & Leeuwen's (1996) theory of multimodality which has three parts: representational, interactional, and compositional meaning. These meta-functions helped in understanding the meaning conveyed through different modes. Analyzing different visuals and language use shows that images are more powerful than words because an image can be kept in mind in one glance but not different words.

Summary of Findings

The advertisements are equally rich in every aspect, and all of the actors/participants and the elements in it are effectively organized and categorized, influencing each other during the meaning-constructing process. For the analysis of the advertisements, the designer focused more on the placements of the elements where an object should be placed in the image for example the placement of the advertised products and other elements used to enhance the beauty of the product such as the celebrities, yummy pizzas or the features of the product listed etc.

Secondly, the most important and noticeable thing is color which plays a significant role in advertising goods and commodities. The selection of colors in the advertisement is also important because colors make a thing attractive and the advertiser must have an idea of the color usage which can make a visually attractive and persuasive. Therefore, the center of attention, most of the time is contrast and color which help us to understand in making the meaning.

Hence, it is concluded that advertisements do not only promote certain products but also reflect certain ideologies and display products in such a manner that possesses enough power to persuade people. Based on the findings, the use of any kind of language along with multimodality in advertisements can persuade the viewers. We concluded that images and words can also be a reliable source of persuasion and they are worth enough to construct any ideology or spread awareness in the viewers about different things.

Moreover, it shows that it is not necessary to speak about a certain thing verbally. We can use images, symbols, signs, colors, and different words to catch the attention of those who watch it. On the other hand, the importance of different forms of communication i.e. written, sign, spoken, or images is emphasized. It shows that for images the word choices are made carefully and the images except the words also contain such things that reflect the social and cultural values that initiate the desire for any product.

Recommendations

This study analyzed different advertisements and found how consumers are convinced and persuaded through visuals and the use of persuasive words. This research covers the area of how through the use of language (gestures, visuals, spoken, written) we persuade someone to buy something.

This research can be furthered by looking at how the producers of advertisements through multimodal persuasion show solidarity with the customers. I recommend that this research can be improved by taking into paralinguistic features as well. 

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