Konstverkets roll i samtida reklam : Funktioner, meningsskapande och en jämförelse mellan svensk och singaporiansk reklam

Sammanfattning: This Bachelors essay takes an in-depth look at how meaning is created through advertisements with references to art. What reasons can be found for why art, a phenomenon that draws highly on analogue reactions, is still widely used in advertisements today in a society that is more and more digitalized. Through a strategic selection of ads picked to illustrate variations in how art is used in advertising, different forms of how meaning is created through these ads are analysed. Semiotic analyses are applied to six different ads that all use art in some way. Methods such as social semiotics and multimodal analysis-tools lay the foundation for how the analyses are made. The semiotic analysis focuses on distinguishing certain factors of the ads that motivate the use of famous artworks. Based on results from previous research in the field I choose to look at three different reasons to why artworks are used in advertisements; humour, seriousness and exclusivity. Furthermore, this bachelors essay also includes a comparative analysis. Half of the advertisements included were produced in Sweden, the other half in Singapore. This comparative aspect of the essay is motivated by the fact that Sweden and Singapore are the two most digitalized countries in the world. This led to an interest in whether the analogue reactions which advertising with references to art are based on may differ between these two countries. The study shows that humour and exclusivity are the two main functions that give reason to the use of art in the analysed advertisements. Furthermore, the semiotic analyses found that humour-based ads tend to depend more on the relation between words and image to create meaning. Advertisements based on exclusivity tend to be more reliant on the visual aspects of the image. A tendency towards visual links between the products and the artwork used in the advertisements could also be found. The comparative aspect of the study found a similar focus on humour and exclusivity in the advertisements, though different forms of humour. A more transparent use of exclusivity in the advertisements from Singapore than the Swedish ones could also be distinguished.