Reading advertising images - a complex semiotic process1

Abstract On an intentional level, reading advertising images is a guided reading. The potential buyer is guided towards an already constituted meaning that needs to be decoded. Over time, advertising has evolved from referential advertising, which presents the advantages of purchasing a product or service, to allegorical advertising, which uses subversive techniques, appealing to a series of elaborate social codes or archetypal invariants, with an effect on the buyer‘s subconscious. Today, the connotative value of the advertising image becomes even more important than the denotative one. Its original purpose is hijacked by the complexity of the phenomenon, because advertising does not just sell products, but images of the world, with a pronounced self-referential character.