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‘Semiotics in the age of digital’Thursday 30th June, 2011, 2pm1

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.TABLE OF CONTENTS01. WHAT IS SEMIOTICS?02. SEMIOTICS & WEB 1.003. SEMIOTICS & WEB 2.004. SEMIOTICS & WEB 3.005. CONCLUSIONS2

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.Semiotics is the study of commercial signs…and the meanings they convey within cultureSemiotics interprets the implicit messages that are embedded in graphic design, advertising, logos etc4

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.But sometimes, there are complex such as paintings, packaging or adsComplex texts communicate multiple meanings through the use of colour and typography and other elements5

CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011Semiotics and qualitative research come from separate traditions using different techniquesQUALITATIVE RESEARCHSEMIOTICS RESEARCHPSYCHOLOGYCRITICAL THEORYCONSUMER GROUPSCLOSE READINGSINSTINCTS AND FEELINGSDECODING PACKS, ADS REPORTED OPINIONINTERPRETATIVE PRACTICECATEGORY MICROCOSMCULTURAL MACROCOSMSemiotics is particularly useful upstream in any consumer insight programme in order to provide foundational category knowledge6

CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011Commercial semiotics is the study of the meaning management in brands and designA STRONGER GRASP OF YOUR CATEGORY AND MARKETPLACEBREAKTHROUGH INSIGHTS FOR LONG-STANDING QUANDARIESUnderstanding what consumers won’t tell you – gaining a sense of how categories are structured symbolically. This helps brand owners obtain ground rules for creative strategy that can be leveraged throughout their brand communications.Semiotics invariably gets to the nub of the matter when research reports often repeat the same outcomes. Semiotics reframes business problems by placing them in a cultural macrocosm. It brings to light influences that challenge assumptionsTHE ‘EDGE’ IN HIGHLY CROWDED HIGHLY COMPETITIVE CATEGORIESADVICE ON HOW TO SCALE BRANDS ACROSS BORDERSSemiotics enquires into how cultural difference alters customer interpretation of branded material – working equally confidently across brands and cultures. Semiotics helps managers to flex ideas globally and how to tailor them optimally. Semiotics provides extra provocation and the injection of magic that supplements qualitative research findings, providing critical revelations that lead to fruitful category disruption. In a competitive world semiotics is a critical advantage. 7

CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011One key semiotic principle is that of DENOTATION and CONNOTATIONDENOTATION1st layer, obvious meaning Literal and informationalCONNOTATION2nd layer, obvious meaningSuggestive and metaphoricalAt the level of DENOTATION a rose is a flower but at the level of CONNOTATION it could signify love, England or left centre politics8

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.Skoda cake ad struck a chord was a successful ad, but what did it signify?This ad fell into the grouping of REGRESSION codes that signify a yearning to return drivers to a state of innocence and to return the fun to motoring9

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.This makes more sense when you consider what happening to the car industry:overcapacity, government regulatory and tax pressure, hyper competition, high buyer bargaining power, pressure on margins, peak oil & fuel system uncertaintyThe power of the car to move us is dwindling: status of the car in societyis waning. These endemic concerns have percolated into UK advertising10

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM codes are an attempt to transform the idea of freedom from previous portrayal of acceleration and fun handling road, now looking increasingly unrealistic into the twitchy impulses of modern art. These semiotic codes all signify the desire to jump start conventional cars into a new paradigm, one which the industry is desperate to reach11

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.Semiotics views brands as consumable signs and the age of digital has allowed these signs to de-materialize and to become more diffuseMIT Media Labs have created a modular logo involving 3 intersecting spotlights to represent diverse employees a dynamic media environment- An extreme example as it boasts 40,000 permutations and 12 colours13

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.The two fundamental properties of brands online are immersion and inter-textuality – brands can plunge users into their worlds in a way that fundamentally changes the conventional idea of the sign and sign user More immersive browsers such ROME will create scenarios where the website is set to become more like virtual worlds such as Second Life where avatars wander through various spatial domains.14

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.For example, English language news channels that compete in a global market seeking to build their brands by breaking news stories, transmitting their editorial authority through graphics and offering multi platform accessCCTV – red lucky colour in PRCFrance 24 – blue = French intellectNHK – diffuse and JapaneseBlack – Russian depth, mysteryWhat is apparent is the extent to which they superficially resemble BBC and CNN whilst retaining their national character through livery etc15

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.RT is the news brands that best demonstrates the power of immersion and of inter-textuality by using a grey black penumbrous murkiness in line with its positioning of “Question More”Russia Today’s successful media strategy, with millions of page views, is a sign of an emerging multi-polar world. It is interesting how channels outer signs of globalized news whilst promoting their own agendas16

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.Semiotics has a number of useful potential applications when engagingwith the social media spaceSOCIAL CONTENT INTERPRETATIONCO-CREATIONSORTINGUNDERSTANDINGDIGITAL MEMESA number of pilot projects are in progress in each of these areas butcannot be discussed due to confidentiality limitations18

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.The semantic web is the original vision of Tim Berners Leewho came up with the protocol for the internet in 1989The semantic web works via a tagging protocol called RDF which allows the underlying structure or meaning of data to be readable by machines20

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.A map of the progression of the internet by Nova Spivak.Xaxis denotes growing connectivity, and y-axis increasing knowledge.According to many, if Web 1.0 was about linking pages, Web 2.0 has been about linking people and Web 3.0 will be about linking data21

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.The way that all this data is linked together allows logical inferences to be made. For example, if Paul works for Frank and Frank works for Judy then the machine knows that Paul works for Judy and a similar principle can be applied to a geographical hierarchy tooJUDYJUDYFRANKPAULPAULThis allows querying machines on the web to reason rather than just by keyword matching. If it knows that Arial is a non-serifedfont and that the word ‘noir’ is a film genre not just a colour, this has major implications22

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.The way that all this data is linked together allows logical inferences to be made. For example, if Paul works for Frank and Frank worksThe ability to detect patterns across vast swathes of dispersed data could be very exciting and potentially revolutionary for semiotics. I believe that semantic web&semiotics can be mutually enriching.��The semantic web helps semiotics to happen on a mass scale by recruiting semiotic technicians and by pulling data from the web. creating a more efficient, streamlined and standardized process.23

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.At the moment, the semiotics process is 100% human operated: interpretation happens through solo working with occasional data mergers between analysts to whom tasks have been parceled out DATA MERGER3. OBSERVATION &INTERPRETATION2. OBSERVATION &INTERPRETATION1. OBSERVATION &INTERPRETATIONThis process puts a big strain on individual human brain power and collating texts, the semantic web could radically configure this process24

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.The process would work as shown below, firstly tagging the data, then sorting through it by inferencing engines and finally analysis.Semiotic analysis findings could be shared over a wiki and if complex moving imagery and multimedia, via using multi modal dashboards 25

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.Agreat example of a precursor to this is happening right now. BBC New Paintings site is an initiative allowing open source tagging of> 60,000 national paintings in order to make them more searchableThis has been enthusiastically taken up by a community of art loversfrom around the UK who are zealously placing tags on multiple items26

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.As more people add tags, more pinpoint and accurate tagging supersedes rougher tags and incorrect tags are weeded outSo for example, the words ‘striations’ or ‘tessellations’ are more precisedescriptors than diagonals or oblongs for defining this painting and help it link it more closely to other works, for example Islamic decorative art.27

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.As more people add tags, more pinpoint and accurate taggingIn the case of new mass scale semiotics a folksonomy of moreadvanced taggers could be formed for cleaning up data received from basic taggers to ‘tidy up’ and cull anomalous interpretations. Folksonomyis a combination of the words folks and taxonomy and is a socially propagated, collaboratively generated, open ended user driven categorization. These taggers would also devise apposite ontologies.28

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.So, for example if a beer client wants to create a new brand of international beer designed to work and they want to use a semiotic analysis to generate a graphic identity based on a mythical animalBeer BrandsAnimal CharactersIf they needed to firstly find out which brands currently used animals, this would involve commissioning local analyststo audit beer and spirits brands in their marketplaceand then look at brands with animal icons29

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.With the new system, once a critical mass of data has been tagged and annotated it would enable advanced querying of a dispersed database of beer labels and animal iconography worldwideBeer BrandsAnimal IconsThis helps bounded rationality and would not only dredge up harder more niche, obscure brands (e.g. micro breweries) it would also make gathering texts much faster and more thorough and bring new information to light30

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.At the Sem Tech conference this year, a paper by a Professor of Radiology at Stanford University showed how visual pattern recognition of shapes and semantics helps in diagnosis of tumors through matching fresh cases to globally archived data on lesions.This got me thinking about how this could be applied to the world of branded and commercial imagery on the internet through pixel sensitive machine learning and could be combined with tag folksonomy cited above31

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.One possible benefit of this process would be a commonly agreed sort of protocol for semiotic investment in a brand. This would be enabled through real time monitoring of content published in RDF linked data by every brand. This helps bounded rationality and would not only dredge up harder more Analogous to Interbrand’sBrand index, an equivalent Symbolic Brand Index would measure connotations identified with each brand, feeding in metrics of coherence, consistency and discounting negative associations32

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.As an example of how semiotics is changing, in 2010 I founded the Semiotic Thinking Group on Linked In it is now close to 600 members – an excellent forum for debate on all topics for finding overseas partners to getting ideas. I recently crowd-sourced views for a conference paper and this sort of dispersed network could provide a valid prototype for both the tagging folksonomies and the semiotics wikis that we discussed devising above34

PREPARED FOR INSIGHT SHOW, LONDON, JUNE 2011CREATIVE SEMIOTICS LTD.IMPLICATIONS OF THIS PRESENTATION FOR INSIGHT PROFESSIONALSSemiotics is a powerful insight tool for revealing deep meanings embedded in brands and all types of cultural texts and marketing material and helps brand owners in their strategic planning tasks

Semiotics is relevant not only to traditional forms of media such as TV advertising, packaging and magazine advertising but is also applicable to online forms and can bring insight to how brands are communicating in that arena too through looking at brand’s use of immersion & inter-textuality

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Insight show slides final june 2011 text

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