Intertextual Techniques Used in Advertisements

The subject area of my MA dissertation is to present the intertextual techniques used in advertisements. In order to get people to identify the product, to remember its brand, and to persuade them that it is worth buying, advertisers usually employ different strategies in the advertising campaign to promote the product sale. The application of intertextuality in advertising language is an effective technique that most advertisers prefer.

Intertextuality is a network of textual relation. It is a kind of relationship by which texts are interwoven with each other, that is, every text is an absorption and transformation of other texts. By intertextuality, texts are connected and repeated. I believe it is an important quality for successful advertisements. The intertextual relationship in advertising can arouse people’s attention, memory, interest and desire, and then stimulate their purchasing action, as it is natural for people to accept things they are familiar with. This is the main reason why I decided to choose and explore this topic, since advertising has became our dominant creative industry and, of course, an important part of our daily lives. Besides, intertextuality was one of the subject of my bachelor's thesis, so I was familiar with the concept.

Quotation, parody and allusion are commonly used techniques to set up an intertextual relation between advertisements or target texts and source texts. They are also the ones that I decided to study and develop in my MA dissertation. Most source texts of these three techniques come from proverbs, sayings, historical events, literary works, famous figures, and names of books, films or songs, etc. Their popularity may produce a sense of intimacy to readers, and attract readers’ attention to advertisements easily.

So, my dissertation is a qualitative study. The first chapter is a the theoretical one and it juxtaposes four concepts of four different researchers and scholars – Saussure’s system of linguistic signs, Bakhtin’s social word and dialogism, Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality and Barthes’s theory of the death of the author. I also describes the basic classification of intertextuality. I gathered many publications and articles to write this chapter, however, the most important one was the book entitled “Intertextuality” by Graham Allen. He deftly introduces the topic and relates its significance to key theories and movements in the study of literature, global cultures and new media. 

The second chapter will be intended to define the intertextual nature of advertising. As I said earlier, the purpose of an advertisement is to persuade the audience into buying the product by means of reforming those unconcerned people. Scholars have noticed the intertextual relation in advertisements and suggested that advertising language should construct its own meaning by interacting other types of discourse. Some researchers focused on shared knowledge between advertisers and readers, and they pointed out that by shared knowledge, readers can grasp the convert meaning of advertisements. Others illustrated how communication forms between advertisers and readers, nature of the communication and aspects of communication in advertising language. This is what I would like to explore more in the second chapter.