KEY FEATURES OF ADVERTISEMENTS

● Problem and benefit: also called "benefit and need," the success of any advert depends
upon appealing to the desires of its readers.
● Image: a major component of modern advertising, images often tell visual narratives, or
employ tactics such as ‘shock value’
● Slogan and copy: as the image is so important in ads, text is kept to a minimum. Slogans
should be short, catchy, memorable and should have a relationship with the image; this is
called anchoring. Look for typographical features such as bold fonts, underlined words
and the like.
● Association: ads sell products… but also sell values. You should be alert to the abstract
concepts that the advert is associating with its product and brand. Understand that
objects, settings, people and so on are symbolic.
● Testimonial: adverts often include the satisfied quotations of customers who already
used the product and are delighted with their purchase. Some ads feature celebrity
testimonials.
● Advertising claims: favourites include the use of weasel words, scientific claims, vague
language, or bandwagon claims. There are many more for you to look out for, and you
might also keep an eye out for jargon which sounds impressive, but doesn’t communicate
meaning.
● Persuasion: adverts are always persuasive. Even ads that are not trying to sell you a
product or service might be asking you to think something, change your behaviour or
help someone. Look out for any and all kinds of persuasive devices in advertising.
KEY FEATURES OF MAGAZINES
● Headline: bold text that reveals the topic of the article and should provide a hook for the
reader.
● Images: photographs of people and places are common features of magazine articles.
They are almost always posed, not natural, and are often as prominent as the copy.
● Layout: look out for box-outs, bullet points, ears and other kinds of layout features.
● Entertainment: although they might be topical and current, most magazine articles are
designed to entertain. Information may be displayed in an appealing way, using pull
quotes and subheadings.
● Buzzwords: being up-to-date, relevant and current means some articles make use of
buzzwords and words that are popular at the time of publication.
● Interactive Features: increasingly, articles that would traditionally have been printed in
magazines are being published online. In this case, look out for interactive features such
as embedded videos, hyperlinks and tabs.
● Embedded interviews: experts on or participants in the topic at hand are often
interviewed and quotations are used throughout the article. In the case of celebrity
articles, the whole piece could be the write-up of an interview
KEY FEATURES OF COMICS STRIPS
● Purpose: comic strips are often humorous; their primary purpose is to entertain.
Nevertheless the strip may make a serious point about a local or global issue.
● Structure: comics and cartoons are drawn in square boxes called panels, arranged in
sequence and read in a linear fashion. The white space between the panels is called
gutters.
● Exposition: text that tells the story is presented as captions.
● Speech and thought bubbles: so you can read the internal and external dialogue of the
characters.
● Mechanics: spatial mechanics is the use of space within and between each frame.
Temporal mechanics is the way time can be slowed down, sped up or stopped.
● Artistic style: comics are drawn purposefully and with intention. Are the pictures crisp,
heavy, weighty, light, cartoony, realistic, bright, dark? Can you tell whether the artist used
pencil, pen and ink, or brush? Words that describe mood and tone can be useful when
analyzing graphic weight (shading and contrast) and saturation (brightness).
● Emanata: items such as dots, lines, exclamation marks or onomatopoeia that depict
action, emotion or sound.
● ‘Cartoonification’: how realistic are the images in the cartoon or comic strip? Realism is
measured on a spectrum from photorealistic or lifelike to simplified.
● Punchline: especially apparent in four-panel comic strips, the joke is revealed in the last
panel.