The commercial I choose to do my paper on was a Doritos commercial from Super Bowl XLII. In a Doritos ‘commercial, a man working in his garden becomes suspicious when he sees his Great Dane burying what appears to be the collar of a missing cat.
Next thing the man knows he’s staring eye to eye with the pooch, who’s realized his master has caught him getting rid of evidence of a heinous crime. To buy his silence the dog slips his owner a bag of Doritos with a note attached reading ‘You didn’t see nuthin. ” The man acknowledges the dog with a smile of agreement and it shows the Doritos logo.The commercial’s punch line comes when the man takes the Doritos inside and happily devours the bag.
As he finishes the bag and is scourging for crumbs his wife from another room says ‘Honey, have you seen the cat? ’ The man from the kitchen looks up at the sliding glass door to see the Great Dane standing on the other side with another bag of Doritos and says “Nope”. The commercial then ends. Ivor Armstrong Richards was a man who had an interest in language and its meanings but he was not yet awakened until teaming up with Charles Kay Ogden.They both ended up writing a book called “The Meaning of Meaning”. The two men where influenced by Francis Bacon.
Bacon believed that language functions as a potential barrier. This then led them to view rhetoric as a study of misunderstanding and its remedies. This then led to the creation of the Semantic Triangle. Every corner helps lead to the process of meaning. The right hand corner of the triangle is the symbol which is an arbitrary label given to a phenomenon. The bottom left corner is the referent which refers to objects that are the item in reality.
At the top of the triangle you have the reference which indicates a realm of memory where recollections of past experiences and contexts occur. In the commercial I chose to pursue the symbol would be the Doritos logo/name. Everyone knows that when they see the Doritos logo/name it calls up the referent through a mental process of the reference. The Referent in the commercial would be the nacho chip itself. The chip is the actual product that they are selling and the consumers are eating/using.
The reference used in the commercial is the thought process that the deliciousness of the chip is good enough to lie for even under the most heinous of conditions aka the murder of a cat. Ferdinand de Saussure bases his study off of what is known as structuralism. In structuralism Saussure believes that the sign is the basic element of language. Meaning has always been explained in terms of the relationship between signs and their referents.
He then breaks sign up into two categories the Signifier and the Signified. The signifier is a sign's physical form (such as a sound, printed word, or image) as distinct from its meaning.The signified is the meaning or idea expressed by a sign, as distinct from the physical form in which it is expressed. The Doritos commercial can be viewed in Saussure’s idea of the signifier and signified. In the commercial the signifier would be the Doritos logo/name. The logo and name gives a physical form that is a distinct from its meaning.
The signified would be the thought process of the man taking a bribe from the Great Dane to forget about the murder of the family cat because the Doritos are so delicious you would lie for them. The two theories are relatively the same except for the semantic triangle having the referent.Saussure believes that the signifier and the signified is enough to receive a message across. When looking at the commercial the two concepts of Entropy and Redundancy are relevant. Entropy is considered to have a lot of unpredictability and disorganization.
This can lead to carrying a lot of information that you did not know. When it comes to the Redundancy concept there is a lot of predictability and organization. This then leads to information you may already know and causes the message to have very little information in the content.The Doritos commercial carries the Entropy concept because you are not expecting the Great Dane to be burying the cat’s collar in the backyard.
You then don’t expect for him to bribe his master with Doritos. The dog in the commercial tends to have a high intelligence which is unexpected and yet very entertaining. But the commercial then gives you the idea that Doritos are that delicious to keep your mouth close. This then intrigues its consumers to taste the chip and go out to purchase them. The commercial not only tells you about the breed of dog but chip company itself.
