Comparison Among Data Mining Genetic

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Cross–cultural analysis of advertisements has long been at the very centre of researchers’ interest, since a thorough investigation into that matter leads to numerous and useful cultural data. In particular, such analysis may manifest current trends in social preferences, reveal cultural values and norms of the target audience and, Finally, be a mirror of the times people live in. This paper provides a brief overview of the Findings in the previous research relating to cross– cultural content analysis of advertisements. Generally speaking, the idea of comparing and contrasting languages and cultures as rejected in advertisements comes from the interest in international marketing and increasing globalization. Nowadays, since cultures are coming in contact far more frequently, the question of cultural influences and, possibly, transfer, is yet again a current issue to be explored. Equally exploited is the aspect of cross–cultural comparison and contrast of advertisements from industrialized countries, on the one hand, and countries in transition, on the other. Reports in the previous research have addressed both linguistic and extra – linguistic features and trends in advertising and emphasized language and culture – specific elements. Due to limitless potential for data collection when analyzing advertisements, researchers have both dedicated their work to linguistic strategies in the constructed text of the advertisement and its influential capacity to persuade future customers, and to extra–linguistic strategies in the images and the role they play in the overall message. The numerous studies have dealt with different product types and focused on different aspects, such as the investigation of images in advertisements aimed at men and women, the comparison of advertising strategies of the same types of products in different cultures, the exploration of the underlying messages and ideas in advertisements, to name just a few. Further, this paper provides some ideas for future studies, since in the era of technological improvements, web advertisements have taken precedence over the earlier forms of advertising and these advertisements’ impact cannot be ignored. Not only can such an analysis lead to insights into cross–cultural differences and similarities in advertising strategies and expressions, but it can also help understand what cultural values, norms and stereotypes are manifested in various advertising strategies and expressions across several countries.

REVIEW OF LITERATURE:

Virtually all disciplines within the humanities and social sciences are now concerned with the functions and effects of symbols, meanings and messages. In recent years, with the emergence of the information society, texts, contexts, images, interfaces, and, above all, information are now being widely researched.

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One of the ways to approach the description of the content of any media text, such as advertisements, is content analysis. Krippendor (2004) defines it as “a research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from texts (or other meaningful matter) to the contexts of their use”. In other words, content analysis is an analytic approach based on the identification and quantification of significant categories of content within a text (both verbal and visual elements), but also the examination of the relationship among those categories. This basically means that a certain meaning can be assigned to the recurrent element, be it visual or verbal, and therefore it can reveal the underlying messages. Dyer (1982, 108) emphasizes that the basic assumption of this research procedure is that there is a relation between: a. the existence and frequency of certain content items in a text, most often verbally represented, and the intentions of the text producer on the one hand. b. the responses of the audience, on the other. As Krippendor(2004) points out, in mass communication research, analysts typically measure different indices to address extra textual phenomena, Five of which have had a long history of use: 1. the presence or absence of a concept indicates the source’s awareness or knowledge of the object referred to; 2. the frequency of the occurrence of an idea in a stream of messages indicates the importance of that idea; 3. the numbers of favourable and unfavourable characteristics attributed to an idea indicate the attitudes held by the writers, the readers, or their common culture toward the object indicated; 4. the kinds of adjectives or hedges used in statements about an idea indicate the intensity or uncertainty associated with the beliefs and motivations that the idea signifies; 5. the frequency of co–occurrence of two concepts (excluding those that have grammatical or collocational explanations) indicates the strength of associations between those concepts in the minds of the audience. This paper cites studies which have dealt with various variables and features, and hence they will be separately emphasized when mentioned, since they are not uniform in regard to the content, i.e. not all the research is restricted to the frequency of items in the text. Linguists have dealt with the analysis of language of advertising from the linguistic point of view and specified linguistic means and devices used in advertising texts: Leech’s (1966) work on English–language advertising in 1960s Britain highlights the extensive repertoire of linguistic choices available to copywriters when creating advertising material; Rees (1982) shows how slogans have been used; Cook (1992) focuses on parallelism, metaphor, metonymy, homophones, puns, parody and rhyme, and Myers (1994) includes alliteration, assonance, rhyme, homophones, question forms, ellipsis, parallelism and puns. In a general survey, Brierley (1995) lists language games, repetition, similes, parallelism, paradox, omission and ambiguity, while Tanaka (1994) concentrates on the use of puns and metaphors, etc. These studies reveal some common characteristics and structures of advertisements across cultures: � at the phonological level: alliteration, rhythm and rhyme, repetition, sound symbolism, � at the orthographical level: deviations in spelling, capitalization, � at the lexical level: trigger words, brand names, slogans, catch phrases, � at the grammatical level: structural simplicity, ellipsis, superlatives, � at the semantic level: metaphors, metonymy, word plays, ambiguity, � at the pragmatic level: direct appeal to the recipients, speech acts of persuasion. This list does not attempt to be exhaustive, but only tries to emphasize the fact that some features are uniform and present the culture. Advertisers also often use inflated language or even invent the new language (‘word magic’). All of these characteristics of advertising language have the same functions – catching our attention and imagination, increasing recognition and enhancing the memorizing effect, making the advertisement easy to repeat and remember (Dyer 1982, 140; Leech 1966, 29). In addition to textual analysis and interpretation of verbal content, the important visual elements have been analyzed, since images are also important in reference to the text, as the combination of these two constitutes elements of the message in advertisements.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY:

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Data collected can be examined in terms of the visual constituents, their features and the way they construct certain ideas alongside verbal text. When analyzing the visual aspect of advertisements, it is important to identify the constituents of a picture and relate these to themes and concepts and wider cultural meanings (Dyer 1982). She, further, adds that even the simplest images are interpreted and reproduced differently in different cultures. In other words, what we see is greatly influenced by our previous knowledge, cultural traditions and experience, which shape our reality and constrain our perception. The picture in the advertisement first attracts the reader’s attention and usually has more impact than words, which are often used merely to reinforce it. Positive feelings and attitudes can be provoked when associating a product with happy families, dreams and fantasy, successful romance, celebrities, beautiful women, childhood, nature, etc. Images are used to construct the messages, which would, if verbally expressed, sound silly. As Myers (1994) vividly explains it: We would laugh at the claim that a soap would make anyone beautiful, if this claim were put in words, but if it is implied by a picture of a beautiful woman holding the soap, our skeptical faculties are not invoked. Concerning the visual aspect, gender stereotyping was one of thoroughly – examined research topics, in particular the question of whether and to what extent gender stereotypes are reinforced through images. Gender is routinely portrayed according to traditional cultural stereotypes: women are shown as ‘sex objects’, housewives or mothers, while men are shown in situations of authority and dominance over women (Dyer 1982). Among the most typical stereotypical portrayals of women, the following are most notable: the women should be at home, they depend upon men, they cannot make any important and responsible decisions, they are rarely shown in their working environment or are shown doing jobs belonging to lower social status, they are seen as sexual objects (Creedon 1993). The problem lies in the fact that repeated exposure to such stereotypical portrayals reinforces traditional roles in the society, which should be, conversely, re–examined and reconstructed according to the changes in social values brought about by the women’s liberation movement. Otherwise, advertising will continue to symbolically degrade women. The findings about gender role portrayals in advertising may reveal how gender roles are changing in the societies, and to what extent the images of gender in advertising are keeping pace with social change (Ahmed 2000). Although the USA was boasting about the women’s liberation movement, Klassen, Jasper and Schartz (1993) examined how men and women are portrayed in magazine advertisements in that country and found that a high number of adverts portrayed women in traditional poses relative to adverts that featured men and women together as equals. However, the traditional portrayals of women have been decreasing since the early 1980s and “equality portrayals” are increasing. Most often the analyzed comparison is made between US advertisements and those of another industrialized country. Weinberger and Spotts (1989) analyzed the information content of television advertisements in Britain and the USA and found that British advertising contained far less information content than American. Biswas, Olsen and Carlet’s study of print advertisements from the United States and France in 1992 revealed that French advertisements made greater use of emotional appeal, humour and sex appeal, while the US adverts contained more information cues. Furthermore, Cutler and Javalgi (1992) conducted cross–cultural analysis of the visual components of print advertising from the U.S., France and the UK. Some of the differences were: the size of the visual, the use of black and white visuals, the size of the product in the visual, the product comparison, while the similarities found were: product portrayal, minority portrayal and elderly portrayal. Therefore, the advertising agency should pay attention to the elements in the adverts which can be standardized and uniform and the elements which have to be localized, if the proper message is to be conveyed. Frith and Wesson (1991) examined the manifestation of cultural values in advertising of the United States and England. %e study found that American magazine advertisements portrayed characters in more individualistic stances than British ones, while, on the other hand, British advertisements made social class differences more evident.

Advertisements are experienced as part of cultural communication and hence can reveal cultural values and norms of the target audience. When carefully analyzed, they can uncover any prevalent or recurring pattern as well as discover its possible meanings and messages. Cross –cultural analysis of advertisements therefore can highlight cultural similarities and differences in advertising as well as reveal how different elements of an advertising campaign are impacted by culture. As was seen, the heterogeneity of content analysis is evident in numerous papers on advertisements. However,

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further research and investigation should be encouraged, because in today’s world, advertising seems to have become universal, or some would say, Americanized. In the climate of increasing globalization, it is vital to notice the social and cultural diversity of the world as rejected in advertisements. For that reason, comparison between two languages and cultures should be foremost, since in that way one can conclude which features of adverts are universal and which are language or culture – specific.

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