Multimodality in Safaricom Advertisement Communication in the Kenyan Daily Nation Newspaper

Abstract

Advertising is a form of communication which has one main function: to make the audience buy the advertised product or subscribe to the services displayed. Consumer advertisements employ more than one mode of communication in designing messages that target their audiences. This often causes interpretational difficulties to the target audiences. This study examined how language co-occurs with the other semiotic forms as used in Safaricom advertisements. The study examined how the visual texts in Safaricom newspaper advertisements impact on the audience's purchasing decisions, analyzed how visual semiotics and written language were used in the Safaricom advertisements to aid meaning interpretation and determined the impact of using the visual images and written language on the audience's ability to interpret the messages. The data analysis was based on Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) a theoretical framework by Kress and Van Leeuwen.

DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2014.v3n6p403