Advertisers’ Use of Verbal and Nonverbal Signs in Myth Creation: A Semiotic Analysis of the ‘Coca-Cola for Everyone’ Commercial

Abstract

In today's world, advertisement has flooded every aspect of life due to its effective impact on our lives. Dull as they sound, advertisements are actually a complex system of signs creatively put together to target and manipulate viewers' choices towards products promoted by companies. In this sense, semiotics has developed over time and has gradually also become a tool for analyzing complex systems of signs produced by advertising companies. Our main objective was to study the role of text and image in the signs of advertising products. We analyzed the video “Coca-Cola for all”, winner of 11 creativity prizes at the Cannes Lions in 2002/2003. Thus, we have divided the video into 63 images accompanied by their short and subtle comments. We found that the video components (music, colors and settings) were carefully chosen to produce a creative and persuasive advertisement. Using Barthes' semiotic theory, we understood the meaning of all verbal and non-verbal signs in the video and extracted their hidden influential meanings. Eventually, we came to the conclusion that advertising image and text are inseparable and one cannot convey meaning without the other. Using image analysis, we extracted the Barthes codes which helped in a better understanding of the signs and showed their functions in the video. At the end of the study, we reached the point where we felt that myth-making through subtle advertising is a confirmed reality; all the previous phases show that Coca-Cola used myth-making to promote its product, especially in difficult times while ensuring maximum long-term profits.