An Analysis Of Creativity And Failure In Advertisements From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

For modern people, advertising is almost ubiquitous in our daily life, and it has become a part of our lives. Advertising is a special type of goal-oriented communication, which is the goal-directed communication activity between the advertisers and the consumers. Its purpose is to attract the consumers and persuade them to take certain actions, causing an active interaction between the advertisers and the consumers. In recent years, many scholars have studied advertising language from various angles. In the 1980s, the French scholar Sperber and the British scholar Wilson proposed the Relevance Theory, based on the Cooperative Principle.According to the Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson, communication is an ostensive-inferential process, and ostension and inference are two sides of the same process. Advertising is a special communication, whose purpose is to convey some information to the consumer and let the consumer understand its intent, so it is also an ostensive-inferential communication. On the part of the advertiser's part, it is a process of ostension, while on the part of the consumers' part, it is a process of inference.As has been stated above, advertisements have been a part of our lives. Among the commercial and public service advertisements around us, there are successful and unsuccessful ones and even some deceptive commercial advertisements. Based on the Relevance Theory, the thesis analyses the commercial advertisement and the public service advertisement. The advertising cases are mainly from some media such as magazines, TV, Internet and so on. The aim of the study is to help people distinguish successful advertisements from unsuccessful advertisements and spot the lies in the deceptive advertisements. The thesis introduces some general knowledge about advertising and analyses some commercial advertising cases based on the Relevance Theory, exploring how some successful advertisements are attractive, creative and popular due to the use of some attention-drawing devices; in the meantime, some unsuccessful advertising cases and deceptive advertising cases are studied so as to reveal the failure or lies in them. And then, the author analyses some public service advertisements on the basis of Relevance Theory, explaining how they are understood by the public and standardize the public morality and therefore serve the public interest. Moreover, commercial advertisement is compared with public service advertisement, and as a result, some similarities and differences are obtained. Through the study, it can be found that the Relevancy Theory is helpful for the consumers to better find out the features of the advertising language, and accordingly realize how the advertisers convey their intention by advertising and how the public service advertisement serves the society. Furthermore, some deceptive advertisements mislead the consumers to get wrong relevance, and the study of the deceptive advertisements based on the Relevance Theory helps people to distinguish the truth from the lies in them, free from being cheated.