| The aim of this study is to identify the characteristics of what makes an effective piece of multimodal communication. The paper discusses how audiences influence the meaning of different messages that they receive by examining two different audiences of the Apple iPod silhouette advertising campaign, Japanese youth and youth in the United States. The iPod ads themselves remain mostly unchanged between these two countries except for the text being translated for Japanese audiences in those ads that included text. Ads, both print and video, were collected from the web and then analyzed using theories of social semiotics and rhetoric. After performing a semiotic analysis of one print ad and one video ad, the study examines the relationships between the audience, the producers of the advertisements, and the ads themselves. Finally, this social semiotic analysis explores the differences and similarities between how each audience received and interpreted the ads by examining how each audience used the product and adapted it to their culture. The results of the study provide support for the influence that the ads' audience had, in turn, on the creators of the ads themselves. The thesis argues that the greatest influence on the making of meaning in forms of communication such as these ads lies mostly with the audiences themselves. The audience's use of the product, in turn, influenced Apple's advertising agency in the creation of new ads within the silhouette campaign. This paper also makes an argument that an important part of what made the ads themselves so successful on the local and international scale was that they were simplistic in design. The ads use of color, music, text, and dancers silhouetted in black actually actively invited audience members to participate in the meaning-making process. The seeming simplicity of the ads made them easily accessible to multiple cultures with minimal localization efforts required. |
