All Ads Are Narratives
All Ads Are Narratives

Summary/Abstract: This inquiry starts with a quotation from Michel de Certeau about the amount of time people spend with narratives. We proceed to demonstrate that narratives in advertisements have a syntagmatic or sequential structure and move from one event to another over time. In addition, people watching these narratives perform paradigmatic interpretations of the characters and events in these narratives. Demonstrating the importance of narratives in people’s lives, the article suggests that some print advertisements can have a narrative element to them. The discussion engages in demonstrating possible methodological approaches derived from this assumption and it offers, among others, an analysis of a classic television commercial, the Macintosh 1984 commercial (1983/1984), which is an example of intertextuality. Another important focus of discussion is overview of the different levels of interpretation one can make of events within a narrative framework of advertisements and commercials.

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