Language-games in advertising

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Advertising tactics in this post modern era have taken a linguistic turn and the mode of communicating ideas tends to shape our views of reality. Products are advertised through television and consequently we see human life disbanding into TV; TV watches us, TV alienates us, TV manipulates us, TV informs us.
There are games in which each statement or utterance is a move that may aid the participants in trying to win the game – to get their version of what is true or right. If this is true then the notion of freedom fashioned by free-market economy is nothing but an illusion; at the end of the day it is the consumer that gets exploited as they fall prey to these professional “spin doctors” as they thrive at the expense of scrutinising individual liberty.
Entrepreneurs and advertising agencies form an “emergent shared culture” and this tactic enables them to disclose selective attributes of the products and consequently promote them by stimulating aspirations, lifestyles and way of behaving generally. They append “connotative codes” to material objects; in other words the advertised products are laden with a range of positive attitudes, feelings and desires within the targeted group which exacerbates the sale of the preferred product.
The images in advertising are a mere simulacra; the whole world of make-believe is conjured where there is no ground to reality. In other worlds the 2-3 minutes of advertising is nothing more than an immerse script and a perpetual motion picture.
This is evident typically in whitening creams advertisement. The notion of white skin which attracts marriage proposals and is a symbol of magnificence in truer sense is conveyed effectively and have a catalytic impact of the mind of the viewers, especially young girls who get more beauty conscious and frustrated to bring their appearance, if not, to correct perfection.
The folly, however, lies in the fact that the audience cannot distinguish between image and reality, no cream can guarantee flawless beauty and that the whiteness is in reality the result of the lightening thrown on the model face and how the camera is positioned to exhibit the targeted features.
In essence, these advertisements shows how consumer is made powerless against these advertisements and how the consumer culture propagated by these skilled advertising agencies perpetuate their own interests; consumers consume not through their choice but through unprecedented power exerted on them which they are oblivious to.
HADIA MUKHTAR SINGAPURI
Karachi