CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
A. Background of the Study
Advertising is everywhere, as it becomes more ubiquitous, we tend to ignore it. But we tend to ignore it; advertisers find a new way to make it more
ubiquitous. As a result, in the television, no one is neutral about advertising. We love or we hate it, many of us do both.
The term of advertising, according to the theory of mass media communication, is a message which is published or broadcasted in the mass
media. It’s designed to provide information that will help to persuade people to buy or accept goods, service or ideas. Advertising is paid for by an
identifiable sponsor, and it’s controlled, its means, the paying sponsor controls when, where and how the ads appears. The advertising is impersonal, it
appeals to broad groups through mass media.
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In the term of globalization and consumer society, the number of advertising to the consumer society is very close into their life especially, in a
big city where the societies live on. The advertising manifests about the commercial product into the variety ways, the product manifests into billboard
all along the road, street banner, and even in the mass media such a newspaper, radio and television, internet, with a very wide range of people can
watch it.
1
Thomas M. Pasqua, et al., Mass Meedia in the Information Age, New Jersey: Prentice- Hall, Inc, 1990, p. 185.
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Afterward, the development of advertisement and advertising system in the consumer society altered to the any problem of social and cultural
landscape. The problem primarily about the usage of sign, the image that appeared, and the information that told, a meaning, and how the advertising
can influence the perception, understanding and people behave. Whether the advertising extends the information about the product offered concretely or,
on the contrary, just extends about the falsifying the reality.
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In other word, the advertising would include and influence the societies with the messages and the ideology systematically inherent in the
advertisement for a modern people. The advertising is no more promoting a product that advertised in the media, but advertising created the system of the
idea with the specific values and stood on that system, autonomously. The advertising produced for the audience contained with a certain
message. A message created with a many codes aimed to the audience for understanding it. The code appears directed to influence the audience to buy
the product advertised, and this is not arbitrary codes, but it’s a code with a message inherent within the advertising.
As codes that appears in the advertising for the mass consumer, contained a message for us to interpret the sign from the advertising, the term
of interpretation of the sign in advertising recognized as semiology or semiotic, as it know better in America. The theory of semiology itself used
2
Yasraf Amir Piliang, Hipersemiotika Tafsir Cultural Studies Atas Matinya Makna, Yogyakarta: Jalasutra, 2003, p.280
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for approaching the sign that appears in the advertising, especially for Coca- Cola’s commercial advertisement.
Ferdinand de Saussure, as well-known as the father of modern linguistics, look forward to a science that studies the life of sign within
societies, he called it Semiology from the Greek Semion “sign”. This is general approach to the study of sign in every cultural life, and even of culture
as a sort of language. As quoted in his book, Course in General Linguistic, he explains:
“Language is a system of signs which express ideas. Hence it is like writing, the deaf and dumb alphabet, symbolic rites, etiquette, military
signal and so on, except that it is the most important of such systems. One may therefore envisage a science which studies the life of signs in the
framework of social life….we shall call it semilogy from the Greek semeion, ‘sign’. It will teach us what signs consist of, the law which they
governed.”
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Afterward, Ferdinand de Saussure proposed a dualistic notion of the sign, relating the signifier as the form of the word or phrase uttered, to the
signified as the mental concept. And it’s important to note that according to Saussure, the sign is completely arbitrary, i.e. there was no necessary
connection between the sign and its meaning.
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The other semioticians that developed the theory of sign is Charles Sander Pierce, he was a founder of philosophical doctrine known as
pragmatism. He preferred use a term of Semiotic, and defined the object sign into tree categories:
3
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistic, New York City: McGraww-Hill Paperback, 1966, p. 16.
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Ibid. p. 67
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1. Icon is the connection between sign and object because of its
similarities. For example, picture and map. 2.
Index is the connection between sign and object because of cause and effect. For example, smoke caused by a fire.
3. Symbol is the connection between sign and object because of the
agreement or convention in societies. For example, flag, a traffic signal and linguistic sign.
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The term of SemiologySemiotic definitely becomes more popular as a new approach for decoding a sign. Roland Barthes as a well-known as the
scientist who practiced Linguistic and Semiology model of Saussurean. In his book SZ proposed another term to understand the sign by arranging and
grouping codes into five, there are a hermeneutic code, semantic code, symbolic code, narrativeproairetic code and cultural code.
Interrelated with the theory of semiotic above, this thesis analyzes of the meaning of the visual aspect and Linguistic of the Coca-Cola’s
advertisements. In this research, the writer applies the theory of semiotic signification, and uses some of the semioticians’ theory. The writer uses a
Pierce’s theory to analyze the object sign in advertisement icon, index, symbol, Roland Barthes’s theory is to analyze the codes that appeared in the
advertisement hermeneutic code, semantic code, symbolic code, narrative code and cultural code, and Saussure’s theory is to find the meaning of the
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Syukron Kamil, “Semiotika Teori dan Hubungannya dengan Sastra”, Al-Turas Mimbar Sejarah, Sastra, Budaya dan Agama, Vol 07, No.11 Januari, 2001, p. 40.
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Coca-Cola advertisement in level of connotative meaning and denotation meaning.
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B. Focus of the Study