A STUDY OF NATURE AND TYPES OF CULTURAL ICONS REPRESENTED INADVERTISING DESIGNS IN NIGERIA

This paper studied contents of Nigerian advertising with a view to determining the extent to which they are signifiers of the cultures of the Nigerian target-recipients. The study was based on content and iconographic analyses of billboards produced in Nigeria between 2014 and 2019 that were purposively randomly selected across the six geo-political zones of Nigeria. The contents were ideological, philosophical, institutional and symbolic by nature and iconographically of anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and textual images. Foreign icons were prevalent and dominant in the advertising designs in the South-West, the South-East and the South-South geo-political zones while icons in those of the North-East, the North-Central and the North-East zones were predominantly of local cultural elements and language. The paper concluded that advertising regulatory agencies and operators of advertising industries should rise to the challenge of imminent identity-loss consequential to scanty inclusion of local cultural contents in advertising visuals in the country.