What is this that you see? do you see an attractive woman, or do you see the car? Are you now more interested in the car? The answer for most of us men out there is *drumroll* yes for everything! No, not because we are sex-crazy cavemen but because of what is represented before us, which is part of the art of semiotics. Oh Semiotics, you sly sucker, you. Semiotics is now a major part of advertising media these days, if not all of it. Advertisers and marketers are figuring out the psychology of people and what attracts them to buy their product. Representation is key for a successful advert because it’s what creates the meaning for the consumer.
The advertisement presented cleverly uses colour, words and images to catch attention for their product using other attraction mechanisms. This controversial ‘sex sells’ approach to this advertisement of the car is quite witty. The Denotation of this image is obviously the sports car with a half-naked woman leaning quite seductively on the bonnet, with the words “Fuel Efficiency never looked so good” across the front. Now, their main product is obviously the woma..car, so whats the point of having all these extra distractions? The answer is because these distractions are connotations to create meaning. The target audience is obviously males as generally more men are interested in sports cars, therefore the woman bending over, exposed and in a very provocative and sexual manner will engage the viewer to the product. The colour of the writing which is white matches the womans skin colour, therefore linking/implying the message towards the woman. The striking red colour of the car strictly contrasts it against the other fairly pale colours to make the main product really stand out. Now the words “Fuel Efficiency never looked so good” possibly connotes that good-looking women are attracted to people who drive this car. But what meaning does these distractions create to the consumer? Do we think that buying this car will cause incredibly sexy women to chase after us? Realistically not to most us sadly, but that’s the ideology and myths that advertisers want to implant in us. Their representation of this product is aiming to create a meaning inside the consumers mind that is not necessarily realistic, this is semiotics. I’m not generalizing that all men have this ideology about women and cars, but im just trying to explain how controversial adverts like this can create unrealistic ideals. Kate Bowles quote “Representation exists in a relationship to something else we call ‘reality'” from the reading ‘Representation and Textual Analysis’ effectively communicates the notion that Representations aren’t the real thing.
Wheres the Seasoning? 
Nice title! Caught my attention, haha! I like your approach on the realistic and unrealistic dimension of semiotics when appealing to the audience. This advertisement definitely doesn’t appeal to someone of my age and gender, almost angers me a little; tells us a lot about the target audience though!