"Semiology is always determined within ideology and in a relation to subjectivity"
I feel like this quote, above all in our first class reading, is perhaps most important in understanding for the remainder of the class. In the field of advertising, this quote is relevent because its necessary for advertisers to encode meaning through symbols into the ad which can be decoded by the viewer, making out what the can of the symbols encoded (which is why the interpretation is subjective) and if successful in the advertisement's ultimate goal, perhaps through humor or sentiment, the audience will remember the product and eventually buy into it.
One advertisement in particular comes to mind when I think about the importance of ideology in commercial advertising and that is the Kay Jewlers christmas commercial. If you dont remember it, its the one where the little girl helps her dad give the mom a three stone diamond ring representing the past present and future. We seldom think about what symbols are encoded in an ad but everything is in the ad for a reason. Even the music can stand a a symbol, the romantic theme song playing softly in the background (which our culture has determined romantic music= soft piano, which also makes me wonder WHY, if we were told from birth that Punk Rock is romantic, would we believe it?). We understand the advertisement cleaerly: diamonds say "I love you". But to another culture, say a remote tribal country, what is a diamond? nothing but a stone. This is why everything in media is so subjective and pertanent to one specific culture. That same tribal community would not understand the codes written into the advertisement or the ideology behind diamonds. The means of how we interpret signs is strictly subjective.
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Symbols, per se, are not necessarily subjective and are not necessarily pertinent to just a specific culture, and not necessarily to "tribes" or "developed" nations. A diamond,is not "just a stone" anywhere in this world. Diamonds, gold, silver, precious stones, and currency, are wealth anywhere you go in the world. Now, the idea of diamonds as symbols of "love" is a definite construct of a marketing company. Symbols, as Carl Gustav Jung pointed out in his "Man and his symbols" a while back, petain to universal ideas embeded in the "collective unconscious" meaning that there are symbols that have a definite meaning and do not vary from culture to culture. Your idea that a "primitive" culture would not give diamonds the same consideration as a "civilized?" culture is miopic, to say the least. Global markets, and the increasing penetration of mass culture "American culture" in the rest of the world, in the form of movies, commercials, etc... have globalized the meaning of certain symbols, such as diamonds, and gold. Now, certain "values" that come along with culture, or cultural values, certainly do not translate well as the symbols that define a culture. Take for instance "Euro Disney" it was a failure not because people did not understand or were not familiar with all the Disney characters, but because these characters were not symbolic of european childhood traditions. It seems apparent by your example of the "diamond" commercial that, in fact, your view of the world is strictly provincial.
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