What makes a semiotician tick? SEMIOVOX’s Josh Glenn has invited his fellow practitioners in the field of commercial semiotics, from around the world, to answer a few revealing questions.

London…

SEMIOVOX

When you were a child/teen, how did your future fascination with symbols, cultural patterns, interpreting “texts,” and getting beneath the surface of daily life manifest itself?

EMILY PORTER-SALMON

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with words and pictures — reading, looking, and making. Looking back, it’s a classic neurodivergency flag, but my childhood was a long series of hyperfixations, of wanting desperately to find out anything and everything about a subject area — from goldfish to comedy to the history of paint. 

I’m a third-culture kid — Malaysian Chinese meets the British Midlands — and I was acutely aware of being different, on multiple fronts. We ate differently, we spoke differently — whether in Chinese or English (my native accent is the same as Ozzy Osbourne’s: it still comes out when I get particularly passionate about something). Growing up in the ’80s and ’90s as a neurodivergent, visibly non-white female, it became very clear that to get by in life, I needed to unpick the patterns of the cultures around me, and learn how I was expected to behave.   

I grew up with a creative family, and I’ve always felt the need to make things, to create meaning — in addition to my semiotic practice, for many years I had a parallel career as a portrait painter. Having studied both English Literature and Art History, my practice as a visual artist is intimately bound to my tendencies as an analyst — the desire to convey meaning, to hide Easter eggs of information for those nerdy enough to want to dig deeper.

SEMIOVOX

Describe your first encounter(s) with the theory and practice of semiotics.

EMILY PORTER-SALMON

I first encountered semiotics (well, Saussurean semiotics) while I was studying English as an undergrad. I think it’s fair to say I was a pretty terrible student — I wasn’t in a great place at the time, and I didn’t apply myself as well as I could have. However, I rediscovered semiotics (and Peirce, and Barthes) while studying for a Masters in Art History, and something suddenly clicked for me. I finally ‘got’ theory, and it was a revelation. My PhD thesis looked at David Hockney’s works engaging with his sexuality as a gay man (at a time in which queer sex was still criminalised in the UK and US), and I found semiotics to be an invaluable tool for pulling apart all the layers of signification that he and other queer creators had to use to communicate meaning on the one hand, and plausible deniability on the other.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

EMILY PORTER-SALMON

I finished undergrad just in time for the 2008 Great Recession, so I ended up doing my PhD and working a series of part-time jobs to support myself in the meantime. 

One of the challenges I faced in academia was that all of my interests seemed to be concentrated in the area of popular culture — at the time, this felt kind of frowned upon. As I was coming towards the end of my PhD, a friend lent me her login for the careers portal at Cambridge University, and I came across a job advertisement for a position in Commercial Semiotics. Something just clicked for me — this felt like fate, a paying job actually tailored to my rather niche skillset. Once I knew that this was a possibility, I was determined to make it into the industry.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

EMILY PORTER-SALMON

Pattern recognition is key. There is a certain kind of person that is naturally going to find this way of thinking easy, and that’s the kind of person that notices when a picture isn’t straight on the wall, when the cutlery does match — it’s about attention to detail, and spotting what fits a pattern, and what doesn’t.

Curiosity of course is important, and an analytical, critical thinking mindset. Third-culture kids are particularly well-adapted to semiotics as we’ve spent our whole lives trying to parse the rules of the cultures around us. If you’ve always lived from a position of ‘Other’, you don’t tend to take cultural norms for granted.

I’m still passionately interested in all things popular culture, and I really value engaging with colleagues of different ages and backgrounds.

SEMIOVOX

What three books about semiotics have you found the most useful and enlightening in your own work?

EMILY PORTER-SALMON

• Roland Barthes’ Image, Music, Text has had a profound effect on my perspective, both as an analyst and as a creator. Studying English as an undergrad, it felt revolutionary to have the permission to interpret a text on an equal footing with its author. (As a creator though, I’ve realised that it’s actually pretty hard to surrender interpretation to the viewer!)
• Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition was an incredibly hard read for me back in the day. But it’s one I always come back to, as culture is all about the repetition and reframing of signs. It’s really interesting thinking about meme culture in the context of Deleuze’s ideas.  
• [American public policy scholar] Elizabeth Currid-Halkett’s The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class is a more commercial read that I have found of continuing relevance. It’s an update of Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of cultural capital for the Late Capitalist era; well worth a look.

SEMIOVOX

When someone asks you to describe what you do, what is your “elevator pitch”? How do you persuade a skeptical client to take a chance on using this tool?

EMILY PORTER-SALMON

I tell laypeople that I work in the Market Research industry — however, on my daughter’s birth certificate, I listed my occupation as ‘semiotician’ just because I could. In the post-Severance cultural landscape, I find that describing our work as ‘mysterious and important’ is quite fun too.

Having been in semiotics full-time for over a decade, it’s been great to see how the discipline has flourished and entered the mainstream. Clients are far more likely to be at least somewhat familiar with semiotics than they ever have been in the past.

When it comes to persuading a skeptical client, I’m always mindful of managing preconceptions and prejudices of the methodology. Certainly in the past semiotics had a reputation for being difficult to understand — interesting stuff, sure, but not necessarily translatable into action. In my own practice, I’ve always worked hard to make things as simple yet logical to understand as possible. It’s not my job to come across as an esoteric genius — I’m there to give clients direction on how to move forward in the most effective way. A client once introduced me to her team as ‘there to help them point out the bleeding obvious’, and that’s my role in a nutshell.

SEMIOVOX

What specific sorts of semiotics-driven projects do you find to be the most enjoyable and rewarding?

EMILY PORTER-SALMON

I really enjoy the intellectual challenge of big strategic pieces. One that sticks in the mind for me is a piece I worked on for the streaming service Twitch, on the future of the Creator Economy. It was a deep-dive into Web 3.0, crypto, superapps, everything. It was a whole new area for me, and while it felt like my brain was melting at times, in the end I experienced a lot of satisfaction from investigating a complex space, and boiling it down to findings that made sense for my client.

That said, I also enjoy FMCG work, particularly across multiple markets — it’s always fascinating to see how values translate across cultures.

I’m a big believer in fieldwork — for most projects, experiencing a cultural space up-close and personal is just something that can’t be replicated virtually.

SEMIOVOX

What frustrates you about how semiotics is practiced and/or perceived, right now?

EMILY PORTER-SALMON

Semiotics continues to suffer from its historical reputation as intellectually fascinating but difficult to implement.

Another challenge is the rise of AI, and clients’ increasing demand for it to play a role in research. AI in all its forms is a hugely important technological development, but it’s not a magic bullet, nor is it a consistent entity — are we talking a narrow AI data-sorting exercise or generative AI? It’s going to be important for practitioners to keep abreast of developments, and ensure that we help clients understand where AI is of relevance — and where human cultural expertise is the best path forward.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

EMILY PORTER-SALMON

With my artist/art historian hat on, I’ve got to go with Peirce — yay for the indexical.

SEMIOVOX

What advice would you give to a young person interested in this sort of work?

EMILY PORTER-SALMON

It’s really helpful to have a grounding with the staples of cultural theory — Barthes, Bourdieu, Baudrillard, etc. — but beyond that, stay curious. Watch commercials. Keep on top of popular culture. 

It’s vital that our work reflects the realities of the commercial world within which our clients operate. So I’d recommend reading the business pages, and keeping track of the big industry players. It’s often the case that world events (e.g. avian flu, dairy sourcing issues, etc.) have a knock-on effect for clients and the challenges they face.

My personal experience trying to break into the industry was that it was a Catch-22 trying to land a position without being able to demonstrate expertise — and yet it was incredibly difficult trying to get that experience. I was from a provincial city in the UK, with no prior connections to the industry, and at the time work was overwhelmingly concentrated in the South-East; I simply couldn’t afford to leave my job and take an unpaid internship in London. Flexible working in the post-Covid era has changed things for the better in this respect. Since joining the team at Sign Salad, I’ve been able to share my experiences with my colleagues, and we now offer paid internships for candidates, and actively seek to recruit beyond London itself.

MAKING SENSE series: MARTHA ARANGO (Sweden) | MACIEJ BIEDZIŃSKI (Poland) | BECKS COLLINS (England) | WHITNEY DUNLAP-FOWLER (USA) | IVÁN ISLAS (Mexico) | WILLIAM LIU (China) | SÓNIA MARQUES (Portugal) | CHIRAG MEDIRATTA (India / Canada) | SERDAR PAKTIN (Turkey / England) | MARIA PAPANTHYMOU (Greece / Russia) | XIMENA TOBI (Argentina) | & many more.

Also see these global semio series: MAKING SENSE (Q&As) | SEMIOFEST SESSIONS (monthly mini-conferences) | COVID CODES | SEMIO OBJECTS | COLOR CODEX | DECODER (fictional semioticians) | CASE FILE | PHOTO OP | MEDIA DIET | TATTOO YOU (semioticians’ tattoos).