A Study On Chinese Internet Advertisements: A Memetic Perspective

Advertising is a product of the commodity economy and it comes into being with the occurrences of commodity production and exchange. Advertising intends to tell people publicly about a product or service in order to persuade them to buy it. Today, with the development of economics and technology, advertisement is becoming an indispensable part of modern society as a form of communication and persuasion. Now advertisements are everywhere in our life. When you are online, internet advertising must pour into your sight immediately. Internet advertising is one kind of advertising, and it has its special media—the internet. With the growing number of netizens, internet advertising plays a more important role. Although many scholars have studied advertising language from different perspectives, few works are on internet advertising langue; and that is why we study internet advertising in this thesis. Due to the conditions of data collection, this thesis will focus on the Chinese internet advertisement.The term"meme"which means imitation was proposed and first used by Richard Dawkins, an Oxford zoologist, in his book The Selfish Gene in 1976. According to Susan Blackmore (1999), meme (pronounced"meem") is"an idea, behavior, style or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture."Memes are stories, songs, habits, skills, inventions and ways of doing things that we copy from person to person by imitation. The vast majority making up the very stuff of our lives, including languages, political systems, financial institutions, education, science, and technology are all memes. Internet advertising belongs to meme, so this thesis will make use of memetics as a tool to study internet advertising. The main parts of this thesis analyze the Chinese internet advertising language from two angles: the horizontal level and vertical level. The horizontal level includes the three levels of phonetics, vocabulary and sentence of internet advertising langue while the vertical level is composed of the four stages of the lifecycle of the internet advertising language (a meme).The successful internet advertising is a powerful meme, which can survive to make its own to be reproduced and disseminated, thus better transmitting information and selling products or service. What language features does successful internet advertising language (successful meme) have? How the internet advertising language becomes a powerful meme thus becoming successful internet advertising language? Answers to these questions will teach internet advertisers how to write a successful advertising. Chinese internet advertisement must have some important features. For example, they must have the features of"simplicity, novelty and humor", thus they can catch people's eyes; they are also with the characteristics of"practicality, consistency, comprehensibility, interactivity, and repetition", so they can easily be copied; with the traits of"emotional factors, authoritative, harmony, sincerity and fashion", they are easily transmitted. Internet advertisers have many methods to reach such effects. For instance, using figure homophones, Chinese character homophones and puns in the phonetics level, using hot words or eye-catching words in the vocabulary level and using sayings, proverbs and special sentences in the sentence level are all effective ways to write a successful advertising.From the horizontal analyses in this thesis, we can find that some successful internet advertising imitates or depends on strong meme to express its own meaning. Such so-called"new wine in old bottle"method uses the same or familiar form but is required to express different content. Through the vertical analysis of the internet advertising language from the lifecycle of a meme, we find that some successful internet advertising imitates or creates on the basics of a strong meme to enhance its vitality. This type of meme uses the same or similar content but is required to express by different forms. These two ways in fact are the two important ways for meme copying. Learning these two ways of meme copying is very helpful for internet advertisers.