Narratives are used in advertisements so the advert can tell the audience a story and keep the audiences attention. Also by telling a narrative during the advert, if the narrative is one of a good quality, then people will want to buy the product being advertised. How a story is told can be in many different ways, this is called it's narrative structure. One structure is a Linear narrative. The linear structure means a story being told from the beginning, middle and end in sequential order. The story will be straight forward with the beginning describing something, the middle showing some sort of problem and then the end will be when the problem has been resolved. The two other main narrative structures for advertisements are a non linear narrative structure which uses flashbacks etc and an open ended narrative means nothing is wrapped up at the end, it is ongoing.Todorovs theory relates to the linear narrative structure as Todorovs theory is where a story starts in some sort of equilibrium which is disrupted ansd then this causes events to occur and then the end of the story is when everything is settled and has reached a different equilibrium.
Below is a Persil advert and is an example of a linear advertisement.
This advert starts off with children playing outside with messy things and then we see that their clothes are dirty and stained, a bottle of Persil then comes on screen and is the solution to get all of the stains out of the childrens clothes. This advert uses the linear narrative structure and Todorovs theory. I like how this relates to mums, who usually do the cleaning in houses so mums are clearly their target audience and it's quite realistic so mums can relate to this.
Narrative adverts to an audience are like a little story, like the product is the main feature and the story obviously revolves around it. It just adds an interesting twist to the advertisement as if you were to just have an image of the product on screen then nobody would pay attention to the advert at all. It uses the audiences imagination.
