ABSTRACT
What advertisements mean is obviously dependent on what is apparently observable on the TV or cinema screen or in the pages of magazines and newspapers. It is important to establish what is there, even though in the normal run of events we don’t pay much attention to advertisements as we walk along the streets or flip through the pages of magazines. Having scrutinized what ads consist of we can then make more reliable judgements about what they mean beneath the surface gloss and witty catch-phrase. By adopting more thoughtful and critical approaches we can check our fleeting, more personal observations against some general survey-type information. In this chapter I want to suggest some possible approaches to the analysis and interpretation of advertisements and present the results of some studies which have looked at the content of ads.
