Representations of children in food advertisements in Cyprus: A sociosemiotic perspective

Abstract

This paper presents a sociosemiotic approach to analyzing representations of children in food advertisements, applied through visual content analysis. In particular, we examine the representation of children in Cypriot print advertisements as main subjects in the construction of advertising messages for food. The selected target group is mainly parents or adults who have children. The present study focuses on the iconic dimension of verbal and non-verbal signs of twenty-six advertisements. Our study shows that advertisements for children's food in Cyprus localize global cultural values such as family, safety and food quality for children through codified iconic (plastic visual) signs that connote characteristics of "Cypriotness".