Joanne Perry

AS Media Studies

Choose a charity website of your choice and explain how verbal and non verbal codes are used to define the products target audience

The non verbal usage of colour on the website is blue which a stereotypical colour for male. Therefore this defines the target audience as males instantly. This is also suggested within the straight to the point verbal use of headlines, which allows the website to be assertive and serious. Due to the use of synthetic sisterhood, discovered by Mary Talbot, this shows conventions of a stereotypical, male product. This is due to male’s presented to being of a higher authority and therefore, synthetic sisterhood uses this representation in order to create the product to meet this representation as people are used to it and can therefore can easily define that target audience. Moreover, the images on the website show close up camera shots of animals faces. This ensures that the website seems more personal through non verbal recognition. Close-up shots also express a person’s emotions and therefore can tell us how the animal is feeling. The use of direct address on the images also ensures that the images look more personal as the animals e.g. the snow leopard, looks like he is looking directly at the audience. Canted angles have been presented on the images to make the animals look more vulnerable and therefore position the audience to have empathy for the animals. The images also show staged posed images of the animals in order to make the website more dramatic and create a more effective impact onto the audience’s feelings for the cause. However, the website consists of verbal text in order to give information about the website but is not over crowded with text and therefore uses more images in order to create non verbal usage of information about the cause in order to show how assertive and serious it is through methods of synthetic sisterhood and the representation of males.