The Media and its Ridiculously Outrageous Influence

For the Mass Communications writing portion or writing assignment, everyone had to do a semiotic analysis of a certain commercial, advertisement or something media related. We were told we had to relate this to at least 3 different texts we have had to read throughout the course. To start off, I think this assignment is great even though it took a while, because it encourages to use the new knowledge we have learned through the readings and apply to an actual media.

I began looking across the internet on different websites, including YouTube, Google Videos and Yahoo Videos just to name a few. Then through searching, "Media Commercial" on YouTube I found on the 5th page of videos one advertisement for a Superbowl Commercial that was appealing to me, and I knew would be great for my paper.

For my semiotic analysis, i decided to base my opinions and relations of the texts and course related media to a Pepsi commercial with Britney Spears as the main attraction. The three course readings I based my relations on were Amusing Ourselves To Death, Ways of Seeing and Understanding Comics, all of which could be related to this one Pepsi commercial in a substantial way. I think i did a good job of combining the ideas of technology, women, and color from the ideas found in these three texts in to a satisfying and compelling argument about the sexiness, color, and advertising in the commercial. My paper came together as such: intro, 1st and 2nd paragraphs general ideas, 3rd Postman relation, 4th Berger relation, 5th McCloud relation, conclusion. I think the way i organized my paper was an important part of delivering my message clearly and more effectively with starting off general and leading to more specific texts which not everyone has read.

Here is the video:



Overall, I worked pretty hard on this project, and I think my relations, the commercail i picked, and my ideas were solid enough to get a pretty good mark, and coming out of this project I have learned more on how to look for underlying ideas in media.