La presente tesi si propone di svolgere un’analisi che metta a contrasto gli aspetti comunicativi di campagne pubblicitarie sociali americane e italiane. L’obiettivo principale è quello di evidenziare specificità e aspetti ricorrenti presenti nella costruzione del discorso americano e italiano, per poi confrontarne e valutarne eventuali punti di contatto o differenze.

L'analisi si basa su due “corpora” contenenti rispettivamente quattro campagne sociali americane e quattro campagne sociali italiane sulla sicurezza stradale, che sono state prodotte e promosse tra il 2012 e il 2019, per un totale di venti spot pubblicitari. Premesso che l’analisi prende in considerazione mezzi di comunicazione moderni che possono sia descrivere che modellare la realtà, l'obiettivo di questo lavoro non è quello di fornire una spiegazione universale e oggettiva di tutti gli obiettivi che le campagne pubblicitarie potrebbero avere, né di presentare una prospettiva univoca su di esse. Questo lavoro è piuttosto orientato alla costruzione di un'analisi contrastiva, che cerca di fornire un’esaminazione approfondita della costruzione e presentazione di questo tipo di pubblicità sociale in entrambi i paesi. La metodologia principale utilizzata per svolgere questo lavoro si basa sulle teorie dell’analisi del discorso, della semiotica sociale e dell’analisi del discorso multimodale. Poiché la pubblicità video è strettamente collegata alla multimodalità, sono stati considerati importanti per l'indagine il linguaggio, il paralinguaggio e gli elementi visuali.

La tesi è costituita da cinque capitoli principali. Nel primo capitolo viene fornita una revisione della letteratura, che serve come base fondamentale per lo svolgimento e la comprensione dell'analisi linguistica e stilistica dei video pubblicitari selezionati. Viene fornita una panoramica generale della comunicazione pubblicitaria, delle sue caratteristiche e delle sue sottocategorie. Il secondo capitolo contiene la spiegazione della metodologia utilizzata per selezionare gli spot pubblicitari e analizzarli. In questa parte sono illustrati i due “corpora” selezionati e vengono forniti i principali obiettivi e la metodologia della ricerca. Il terzo e il quarto capitolo presentano i risultati delle analisi sistematiche condotte.

Queste sezioni sono organizzate seguendo sei parametri fondamentali di ricerca, ovvero l'uso del linguaggio e del paralinguaggio, la creazione del contesto, le funzioni predominanti della

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comunicazione, le principali strategie testuali-discorsive utilizzate per costruire il discorso, l'interattività del significato delle immagini, e i principali tipi di linguaggio utilizzati dagli spot. Il quinto e ultimo capitolo, infine, si concentra sulle conclusioni dell’analisi. Viene effettuata una valutazione contrastiva dei risultati ottenuti dall’analisi dei due “corpora” e vengono evidenziate le somiglianze e le differenze presenti tra di essi.

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ENGLISH

This thesis aims to carry out an analysis that contrasts the communicative aspects of American and Italian social advertising campaigns. The main objective is to highlight specificities and recurring aspects found in the construction of the American and Italian discourse, to then compare and evaluate any contact points or differences.

The analysis is based on two corpora containing respectively four American social campaigns and four Italian social campaigns on road safety, which were produced and promoted between 2012 and 2019, for a total of twenty videos. Given that the analysis takes into consideration modern means of communication which can both describe and shape reality, the goal of this work is not to provide a universal and objective explanation of all the objectives that the advertising campaigns could have, nor to present a univocal perspective on them. This work is rather oriented towards the construction of a contrastive analysis, which seeks to provide a thorough examination of the construction and presentation of this type of social advertising in both countries. The main methodology used to carry out this work is based on theories of discourse analysis, social semiotics, and multimodal discourse analysis. Since video advertising is closely related to multimodality, language, paralanguage, and visual elements were considered important for the investigation.

The thesis consists of five main chapters. The first chapter provides a literature review, which functions as a fundamental basis for the development and understanding of the linguistic and stylistic analysis of the selected advertising videos. A general overview of advertising communication, its characteristics and its sub-categories is provided. The second chapter contains the explanation of the methodology used to select the spots and analyse them. In this part the two selected corpora are illustrated, and the main objectives and methodology of the research are provided. The third and fourth chapters present the results of the systematic analyses conducted. These sections are organized according to six fundamental research parameters, namely the use of language and paralanguage, the creation of context, the predominant functions of communication, the main textual-discursive strategies used to construct discourse, the interactivity of the meaning of the images, and the main types of language used by the commercials. Finally, the fifth and last chapter focuses

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on the conclusions of the analysis. A contrastive assessment of the results obtained by analysing the two corpora is carried out and the similarities and differences between them are highlighted.

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GERMAN

Die hier vorgestellte Diplomarbeit basiert auf der Analyse einer Gegenüberstellung zwischen amerikanischen und italienischen Social-Advertising-Kampagnen zur Straßensicherheit.

Wesentliches Ziel ist es dabei, die jeweiligen Spezifika und die sich wiederholenden Aspekte im amerikanischen und italienischen Diskurs hervorzuheben und weiterführend die möglichen Unterschiede und Übereinstimmungen der erhaltenen Resultate vergleichend zu untersuchen.

Die Analyse baut auf zwei „corpora“, die sich aus jeweils vier amerikanischen und vier italienischen Social-Advertising-Kampagnen über Straßensicherheit zusammensetzen, die in den Jahren 2012 bis 2019 produziert wurden und insgesamt 20 öffentliche Spots umfassen. Angesichts der Tatsache, dass die Untersuchung Kommunikationsmittel in Betracht zieht, welche die Realität sowohl beschreiben wie auch gestalten, liegt der Zweck dieser Arbeit nicht in einer universellen und objektiven Erklärung aller Ziele, die diese öffentlichen Kampagnen haben könnten; vielmehr gilt das vorrangige Interesse einer kontrastierenden Analyse, die versucht, eine profunde Überprüfung dieses Typs „sozialer Werbung“ in den beiden Ländern darzustellen. Die hauptsächlich verwendetet Methodologie in dieser Arbeit basiert auf den Theorien der Diskursanalyse, der Soziosemiotik und dem Multimodalitätsdiskurs. Da Werbevideos eng mit der Multimodalität verknüpft sind, werden sowohl die darin verwendete Sprache wie auch die Parasprache und die visuellen Elemente als wichtig für die Untersuchung betrachtet.

Die Diplomarbeit ist in fünf Hauptkapitel gegliedert. Im ersten Kapitel wird ein Überblick über die Literatur vorgelegt, die als Fundament für die Entwicklung und das Verständnis einer linguistischen und stilistischen Analyse der ausgewählten Werbungen dient. Gleichzeitig wird ein generelles Panorama über Werbekommunikation entworfen, über ihre Charakteristika und Unterkategorien. Das zweite Kapitel enthält Erklärungen zur verwendeten Methodologie. In diesem Teil wird auf die beiden ausgewählten „corpora“ und die Hauptziele der Untersuchung eingegangen. Im dritten und vierten Kapitel werden die

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Resultate der systematisch durchgeführten Analyse präsentiert. Dieser Teil ist in sechs Abschnitte gegliedert: in die Verwendung des Werbejargons und der Parasprache, die Entstehung von Kontext, die vorherrschenden Funktionen von Kommunikation, die wesentlichen Text- und Diskursstrategien, die Bedeutungsinteraktivität von Bildern und die wesentlichen Ausdrucksweisen, die in den Spots verwendet werden. Das fünfte und letzte Kapitel fokussiert sich auf die Schlussfolgerungen der davor präsentierten Thesen. Dabei werden kontrastierende Bewertungen der erhaltenen Resultate der beiden „corpora“

vorgenommen und Ähnlichkeiten und Unterschiede zwischen ihnen aufgezeigt.

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INTRODUCTION

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Why analysing social advertising communication?

Analysing the different ways in which modern communication reflects and builds our reality, not only can we have a multifaceted and more complete view of the world that surrounds us, but we may also reach a deeper understanding of ourselves. We can realise how many of the situations we experience and interpret are often taken for granted and assumed to be the way they are by nature, while in fact they could be a social construct that we have learned and retained through interactions and persuasive discourses.

Thanks to the enormous technological developments that bring continuous changes to the modes through which we communicate, the most common and the fastest ways to spread information and entertain people are nowadays television and the internet. They are the media of globalisation, which have taken the role of both social mirrors and of shapers of new ways of thinking and behaving. What is promoted through these media can greatly affect our lives and it is important that we do not forget how many consequences this brings.

Mass media manage to connect many people who are distant from each other, and they often function as promoters of ideologies and thought patterns.

Advertisements are among the forms of discourse which strongly contribute to how we build our identities and habits. Advertising communication uses indeed many persuasive techniques aimed at influencing the public for various purposes. This communication can be utilised to share ideas which create and maintain social justice, and to trigger debates even among the younger generations. A reason for the interest in advertising communication is that, as one of the major discourse types which influences our sense of self, it enables us to study and understand parts of our interpretation processes (Crompton, Kasser 2010, 24).

When advertisements are utilized to explore and promote thoughts and behaviours which can benefit people, they can serve to foster the growth of civil society around shared and shareable values. They can create forms of relationships that celebrate the bonds that hold together a community that is called to come together and re-motivate itself on certain basic ethical values and certain emotions for a common good (De Sandre 2008, 50 in Gadotti, Bernocchi 2015, 22). Although advertising is a powerful tool that can construct a reality, advertising discourse does not presume to impose its messages on passive audiences, as it provides texts which the receivers can take up and transform, or ignore entirely, depending also on the type of language and representations employed (Myers 1999, 14). Nonetheless,

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advertising’s communicative power can lead us into assuming that the way society is re- presented is the (only and objective) reality, which may affect our evaluations or even cause a social compulsion to imitate the (often purposefully) stereotyped models presented. For this reason, a modern kind of communication which entails a large audience can run the risk of excluding and denying alternative points of view and perspectives. Advertising and media communication in general have indeed the intrinsic power of producing, instead of inclusion and solidarity, exclusion and division.

The task of constructing an informative and persuasive discourse that creates a cognitive impact in the public lies thus in the completeness and reliability of the communication. The recipients must in turn act as active interpreters of the messages they receive, which will also be perceived and understood differently based on the communication methods used, the type of target audience to which they are addressed, and the socio-cultural context in which they are promoted.

Why focusing on road safety social campaigns?

Together with other behavioural measures, road safety campaigns are used as a means of influencing people to behave more safely in traffic, and they can have multiple purposes, such as informing, raising awareness, or making individuals change their potentially dangerous behaviours adopting safer ones. In the past, the marketing of road safety usually relied on mass media advertising to raise awareness on risks and illegal or inappropriate behaviours; however, the development of alternative digital media is now transforming the social advertising communication on road safety. Today, targeted communication can be undertaken to influence people’s thinking and behaviours, and it seems thus interesting and useful to analyse digital road safety social campaigns which support the adoption of

“private-sphere” behaviours that individuals can adopt to minimise risk or to increase compliance (Faulks 2011, 38).

Technological progress creates the possibility of new and effective communication strategies that can be valid in achieving improved knowledge and understanding of risks and safety for all road user groups, and in promoting positive cognitive and behaviour change towards safer road uses (ibid.). The development and employment of social advertising campaigns on road safety, together with the exploration of the use of the internet, digital

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technologies, and direct marketing has proved capable of supporting and fostering innovation and intervention in this area.

Objectives and methodology

The main purpose of this thesis is to conduct a contrastive analysis between American and Italian social advertising campaigns on road safety. The analysis will be based on two corpora respectively containing the web links to four American social campaigns and four Italian social campaigns on road safety, which were produced and promoted between 2012 and 2019. The focus will be on the advertising spots that can be found on the sites of the campaigns themselves or of their respective promoters. During the creation of the corpus, the relevance of the advertising campaigns was taken into consideration, specifically choosing some of the first results of web searches on the subject, in order to have greater certainty that the communication used was for both countries capable of reaching about the same potential number of web users. The aim of the contrastive analysis that will be carried out is to understand and describe any contact points or differences in the communication styles and techniques used in the video messages.

As we are going to deal with means of communication which can both describe and shape reality, the goal of this work is not to provide a universal and objective explanation of all the goals the advertising campaigns may have had, nor to present an unambiguous perspective on the advertisement campaigns that will be discussed. The main focus will be directed on building a contrastive analysis, which tries to dig into the construction and presentation of this kind of social advertising in both countries.

This analysis will be based on discourse analysis theories, social semiotics, and on multimodal discourse analysis. Because video advertising is strictly linked with multimodality, both language and paralanguage will be important for the examination. Both linguistic and visual aspects will be considered to uncover the modalities in which the discourse of social advertising spots on road safety is carries out in the two selected countries.

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Outline of the contents

This thesis will consist of five main chapters. In the first chapter, a literature review is provided, which will serve as a fundamental basis for carrying out and understanding the linguistic and stylistic analysis of the selected advertising spots. A general overview of the advertising communication, its characteristics, and its subcategories will be provided. The importance of modern mass communication when producing and promoting messages will then be discussed. The focus will then shift to defining what social communication is and what its main purposes and characteristics are. The types of language that this kind of communication uses will be described, and some context and language construction processes which are typically used to engage viewers will be covered. Finally, social campaigns on road safety will be described, focusing on their main features and the elements on which they tend to play.

The second chapter contains the explanation of the methodology which was used to select the advertising spots and analyse them. Two main corpora containing information about the selected American and Italian advertisements will be illustrated. Firstly, the choice of a contrastive analysis between American and Italian social advertising campaigns will be explained, then the main objectives and methodology of the research will be provided. A detailed explanation of the research approach used through this study will finally be presented. The examination will be based on discourse analysis theories, social semiotics, and on multimodal discourse analysis. The general approach to this analysis will be both a qualitative and a quantitative one. Discourse analysis will have a central throughout this examination, and, since it is carried out through descriptive methods which can have a certain degree of subjectivity, a qualitative kind of approach will be used to illustrate the most used methodologies through which discourse is constructed in the selected advertising spots.

The third and fourth chapter present the results of the systematic analysis of the American and Italian corpus, respectively. A discursive illustration of the results that will be deduced from the set of advertising videos examined will be provided. The sections will be organized according to six main research points, namely the use of language and paralanguage, the creation of context, the predominant function(s) of the communication, the main textual-discursive strategies used to construct discourse, the interactive meaning of images, and, finally, the main type(s) of language used by the selected spots. A table within

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which the videos of the corpus will be systematically analysed using the methodology described in Chapter II is included in the Appendix (Table 3). The data analysis of the corpora will show the relevance of the results, establishing relationships, patterns, and trends within the various parameters of this research study.

The fifth and final chapter focuses on the conclusions of this thesis. After carrying out the two systematic examinations of the American and Italian corpora, their main results will be illustrated contrastively. The general approach to this analysis will be both a qualitative and a quantitative one; nonetheless, to present the results in Chapter III and IV, a qualitative kind of approach will be used to illustrate the most used methodologies through which discourse is constructed in the selected advertising spots. The data analysis of the two corpora will show the relevance of results, establishing relationships, patterns, and trends within the various parameters of this research study. The final part of this section will illustrate the limitations of this work and it will forward ideas for possible future research that can be implemented to expand it.

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CHAPTER I

Literature Review

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1 Introduction

In this chapter a literature review is provided, which will serve as a fundamental basis for carrying out and understanding the linguistic and multimodal analysis of the advertising spots which will be examined. A general overview of advertising communication and its main characteristics will be provided, and the importance of modern mass communication when producing and promoting messages will then be discussed. Then, we will dig into what social communication is and what its main purposes and characteristics are, and we will describe the linguistic features and language construction processes that social communication uses. We will cover aspects of multimodality which are fundamental when dealing with discourse types which contain both linguistic and visual elements. Finally, social campaigns on road safety will be described, focusing on their main features and the elements on which the promoters tend to play to engage viewers.

1.1 What is advertising?

Advertising is so deeply rooted in the everyday life of modern readers that few, if any, wonder what an advertisement is. In contemporary society, advertising is everywhere, and it has probably become one of the most powerful communication tools used to deliver a message to a target audience. Whether we are in public or in the privacy of our homes, whether we are alone or with our family or friends, we are surrounded by advertising, and it is almost impossible to imagine our world without it. Advertising is not something separate from us but rather a part of us and of something we belong to (Cook 1996, 182). Nonetheless, we do not often reflect on the advertisements’ nature as a form of discourse and as a system of language use and, in fact, because we are exposed to hundreds of advertising messages on the daily basis, we usually do not to notice them (Goddard 2002, 5). But what exactly is advertising, and what do advertisements do?

The prototypical ad will vary between individuals, cultures and periods, but probably, [for an American viewer], it is likely to be an ad showing a satisfied family eating an instant dessert (Cook 1992, 13).

The term advertising derives from the medieval Latin verb advertere, which means “to turn towards”, “to direct one's attention to” (Danesi 2015, 1). Thus, advertising can be broadly described as any form of public announcement aimed at directing receivers’ attention to the

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existence of a product, service or issue (El-Daly 2011, 25). Usually, when thinking of advertisements, we assume that they must always refer to a product or service. It is true that these are most of the ads, however there is also a minority of “non-product” ads, which do not belong to this category (Cook 1992, 231).

If we view advertising as a genre advocating a change of behaviour, rather than as just referring to a product, then both kinds of ad can be accounted for. Products ads also refer to a change of behaviour: buying the product (ibid.).

Advertising is constructed to shape the society’s attitude towards different issues, and it is aimed at influencing people’s way of thinking and behaviour (Skorupa, Duboviciene 2015, 108). For these reasons, advertising discourse very often contains some degree of persuasive strategies and rhetorical categories, which is why there is a key tension in the study of advertising (M. El-Daly 2011, 26). Social conscience often finds ads manipulative and powerful, which may give rise to three different types of judgements. Some believe that advertising has a huge impact on society, influencing it for good as well as for bad, others consider advertising as an amoral activity, which objectively reflects social situations and changes, whether good or bad (Cook 2001, 2). There is then a third view, which places advertisements under a negative light by stating that any apparent benefit or social concern they may express is indeed always fraudulent (ibid.). Therefore, not only do people have very different perspectives on advertisements, but advertisers themselves find “people are sceptical and unpredictable in their responses” (Myers 1999, 3).

Nevertheless, whatever the public's views and responses are, there is no doubt that an advertisement functions both as a mirror of society, which merely describes its reality, and/or as a shaper of it, which moulds people's thinking, attitudes, and behaviours (Gadotti, Bernocchi 2015, 25). In fact, advertisements are transitory because each one of them is short- lived, their effects are “longstanding and cumulative” (Goddard 2002, 3). These messages then function both to reflect and to construct cultural values, which makes them a form of discourse that contributes to how we construct our identities. What is crucial about advertisements is that, for them to work “they must use our commonly shared resources of language in ways that affect us and mean something to us” (ibid.).

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1.2 Historical background

Advertising has ancient roots and is intimately connected with the development of the first commercial activities and the related signs or product symbols. Its development started in Europe with the invention of printing. In 1479 the British typographer William Caxton distributed a booklet to advertise his publications, while the first ancestors of the flyers began to circulate in the cities of the continent at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In the first half of the twentieth century, advertising became a well-known communication practice, thanks to the advent of mass media and to the consolidation of rhetorical and persuasive techniques developed by the nascent commercial advertising industry. It is in fact starting from this period that commercial advertising went through a long pioneering phase, which then laid the foundations for industrialization. After the Second World War the mass market started to take hold, which contributed to the boom in mass advertising. During these years, non-commercial advertising was also developing, and the main intervention areas it focused on were the protection and prevention of public health and safety in the workplace (Gadotti, Bernocchi 2015, 28).

From then on, the nation States begin to take on new responsibilities by increasingly incorporating the new expectations of well-being. While the sphere of political and social rights is widening, the well-being of citizens enters as the content and goal of the action of the nation states. Thus, posters used for a long time only for public purposes take on an educational function over time to discourage incorrect behaviours, such as excessive alcohol consumption or to inform about the danger of disease contagion (ibid.).

1.3 Categories of advertisements

Attempts to define advertisements as a genre are in vain when they look for textual or contextual features which all ads have in common but do not appear in other genres (Cook 1999, 12). One of the main issues of defining “ad” is linked to that of defining categories of ads. In fact, we can categorise advertisements in different ways, according to the characteristic on which we want to focus. By the media with which they are delivered (printed books, newspapers, magazines, public posters, radio, television, the Internet etc.), by the product or service they promote (not all ads, however, sell something), by technique, which varies depending on the types of appeals to the consumer, by the use denotative or

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connotative language, by its frequency and by its length (Cook 1999, 16). Another categorisation of advertisements, one of the most significative for advertisers themselves, is the one done by consumer. The selection of a target audience, which may contain different possible consumers, is crucial for an ad to be successful. Common divisions are those by lifestyle, socioeconomic class, age, gender, personality and habits (ibid.).

Ideas we receive about the world through advertising are all driven by who the advertisers think is likely to do the purchasing [or react to the presented social issue], and what that group needs to think about itself in order to spend money on the product [or, more in general, to change their behaviour] (Goddard 2002, 70).

Although the categorisations suggested above broadly distinguish types of ads, they often overlap with one another, for a certain media may work better on one group than on another, and a specific technique may be more effective on a specific social or economic class. Thus, these divisions do not allow us to clearly separate one kind of ad from another. When analysing ads, it is important to keep in consideration each of these aspects and tolerate fuzzy areas between concepts.

It is also important to distinguish advertising based on its purpose. In fact, although all advertising communications are aimed at somehow changing the behaviour of a target audience, we can identify two main categories of advertising communication based on their primary objective: consumer and trade advertising, and non-commercial advertising.

Consumer advertising is a kind of advertising which is

directed at the ultimate user of a product or service (consumer) […]. Sometimes consumer advertising is directed toward a purchaser of a product or service who will then pass that product or service on to its ultimate consumer, as in the case of pet food advertising. Most radio, television, newspaper, and magazine commercials and advertisements are consumer advertising¹.

Trade advertising is directed primarily towards professionals, and it is

1 All Business: https://www.allbusiness.com/barrons_dictionary/dictionary-consumer-advertising-4965321- 1.html

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designed to stimulate wholesalers or retailers to purchase products for resale to their customers. […] The primary objective of trade advertising is to promote greater distribution of the advertised product².

Non-commercial advertising, also known as social advertising, is a type of advertising which has typically the purpose of educating consumers or promoting some specific ideas, issues of social concern or political agenda³, and is directed mainly towards society, community groups or politicians (El-Daly 2011, 25). The present work will touch this last category of advertising.

1.4 Online video advertising

Today, we often watch online videos in some form. Whether it is checking out the latest social media posts, or watch our favourite TV shows, we usually consume a lot of video content. The development of video communication has not gone unnoticed by advertisers, who often rely on multimodality and mass communication. Indeed, as will be discussed, pictures and sound create both their own meaning and other implications resulting from their interplay with each other and with the text inside the ad itself or outside, near it (Cook 2001, 95). As a result, there has been substantial growth in the video advertising market as well.

Its boom is due to the rise of digital media and the proliferation of ever more sophisticated mobile devices.

The advertising units that run online are like the traditional spot advertising we may see on television, although they are usually reduced to be a shorter version than their TV counterparts. “In 2010, video ads accounted for 12.8% of all videos viewed and 1.2% of all minutes spent viewing video online”⁴. Advertisers employ a lot video advertising because videos are now fairly inexpensive to make and broadcast, and they can even be kept on the Web even if they were originally intended for and broadcasted on other media, such as television or cinema screens, attracting views for as long as the communicators desire⁵.

2 All Business: https://www.allbusiness.com/barrons_dictionary/dictionary-trade-advertising-4965321- 1.html

3 Business Dictionary: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/non-commercial-advertising.html

4 Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_advertising

5 ExactDrive: https://www.exactdrive.com/news/what-is-video-advertising-4-video-ad-examples

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Modern communication is characterised by the ability to reach a large audience quickly and with different modalities simultaneously. Today, the most growing means of communication is the World Wide Web, a tool on which many advertisers rely thanks to the way it seems to breach the limitations of other media (Myers 1999, 133). The Web and digital television are commonly defined “interactive” and they have achieved both the “displaced and disseminated” communication of print and broadcasting, and the capacity to respond to the individual receivers as if they were involved in face-to-face interactions (Cook 2001, 93). The main features that make the internet efficient and effective for mass communication can be grouped in the five points listed below.

1 “The audience is distributed in space”. While print journals and broadcast channels are geographically limited and locally regulated, accessing a web page physically distant is instead very easy and quick.

2 “The audience is distributed in time”. While TV broadcasts are transmitted on a strict schedule that defines the experience of the receivers, we page are “fixed”, therefore everyone can access them when it suits them.

3 “Hypertext encourages a web-like set of connections”. While print ads are seen in relation to the content around them, and broadcast ads are seen in a break, a web page can be put in an array of new contexts, without major constraints of linear ways of reading.

4 “Space and time are cheap”. While advertisers buy expensive space or time in other media, there are no constraints in the total space or time available on the Web. The constraints are in fact in the way users come to and move to the medium.

5 “The Web provides information about users as it provides information to users”.

(Myers 1999, 134)

Advertising on the net consists of creating advertisements (in the form of banners, links and other advertising formats) which can attract the greatest number of users to a specific site. A typical example of online advertising are banners, namely those ads of different sizes, formats and content which appear in different parts (usually at the top and along the sides) of a website. Questions regarding what kind of medium the Web is arise when reflecting upon its use(s) as a multimodal communication tool which exploits intertextuality. It is difficult, even for promoters and advertisers themselves, to give a rigid definition of the uses and purposes of the Web, as its possibilities of use are truly manifold.

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Compared to advertising conveyed on traditional media (radio, TV, press, etc.), online advertising has three fundamental advantages:

- it allows communicators to create very targeted messages according to the audience and, in the most extreme cases, even to create customized communications, tailored to individual users,

- through PPC (pay per click) campaigns, it can be more convenient: the PPC technique, instead of investing a fixed sum as in the offline, allows you to pay the predetermined amount only when users click on your ad,

- it can be constantly monitored, so as to understand if it is better to interrupt the campaign or increase the available budget, and finally ROI (Return On Investment) can also be easily measured on the Internet,

- in trying to understand its uses, web advertisers turn to analogies between the Web and existing media and places which we can define as more traditional (ibid.),

- they can treat the site as a poster, putting banners in places people are likely to see them.

The main difference is that this type of poster can direct people to another site with much more complete information,

- they can treat the Web as a billboard, a place where a lot of people can display messages.

This can help some companies suggesting customers a sense of openness and community,

- they can treat it like sponsoring a programme, which allows for branding, associating the values and perceptions of the site with the communicator,

- they can give commercial value to up-to-date data and archives developing on-line magazines and newspapers. For the most part, who relies on this type of use are business journals, which charge a subscription fee to release information,

- they can take on the role of the broadcasters themselves and put together different kinds of contents. For example, CNN presents itself as a general news channel,

- they can focus on pointcasting, a word which suggests the way that the Web can tailor information to individual users based on their habits and preferences,

- they can also treat the Web as a club, namely a space with different kinds of entertainment which constantly change to encourage repeat visits. Sometimes they ask visitors to register and become part of the community, in return for further access,

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- they can see it as an interactive catalogue. Whether customers buy directly from the Web or not, the site can hold much information about products and offers,

- they can see the Web not just as a catalogue but as a shop. The major advantage of such channels is that the Web is much more easily searchable, and Web providers can store information about customers so that they can offer them suggestions that match their previous purchases.

(Myers 1999, 138-140)

Advertisers see the Web in such different ways because it can be employed for several different marketing purposes. It can concern direct sales and building a loyal customer base, stimulating visitors to physical dealers, branding products, having market research functions such as getting customers’ information and so forth (ibid., 140). Being a full-fledged type of advertisement, even social advertising exploits the Web, alongside TV commercials, to promote messages of social interest, inform users, and make sure that people do not engage in behaviours potentially dangerous for both the individual and the community.

1.5 Social advertising

Social advertising is the set of messages and communications created and broadcasted with the methods of commercial advertising, but which, contrary to the latter, are not aimed at the sale of a product, a service or the circulation of the name of a brand, because they pursue purposes of social utility and of collective interest (Stella 1994, 361 in Gadotti, Bernocchi 2015, 21). Social campaigns pursue the main purpose of creating and promoting awareness, ideas, attitudes, behaviours, causes of public value or raising funds, whether they are related to the life of individuals, concern the protection of specific groups of people or whether they are linked to the survival conditions of an entire population (ibid.).

Social advertising is thus primarily advertising, which implies that it benefits from the persuasive techniques typical of advertisements which try to motivate consumers to take a stand on an issue they felt neutral about initially, or to persuade them to change positions in order to benefit themselves or society in some way. Persuasion can be described as the

“act of persuading someone to do something or to believe that something is true”⁶, not to be

6 Collins Dictionary: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/persuasion

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confounded with the concept of mere propaganda, which instead evokes a conscious manipulation of the individual’s symbols and psychology (Gadotti, Bernocchi 2015, 21).

While commercial advertising is mostly promoted by profit-making companies, social advertising campaigns are instead carried out by non-profit organizations, which focus on ongoing existing issues and whose main purpose is to provide services or information which cannot be monetized and are not available on the market (such as education, women empowerment, rural development, consumer rights, blood donation and so forth⁷).

Appropriate distinctions must be made within the promoters of this kind of advertising.

Indeed, non-profit organizations can consist of both central public bodies (such as the State, ministries and research institutes), or local public bodies (such as regional bodies, municipalities and hospitals), and associations, groups or movements that arise spontaneously in the social fabric (Stella 1994, 362 in Gadotti, Bernocchi 2015, 27).

Social advertising presents itself rather as a non-deceptive or fraudulent type of communication, which is promoted in the interest of the listeners, rather than for a profit by the promoter(s). Therefore, it is a type of persuasive advertising that touches ideas and issues of public interest, in order to encourage the growth of civil society around shared and shareable values (Martelli 2006, 12 in Gadotti, Bernocchi 2015, 22). Although social advertisements main objective is to change their audiences’ behaviour for a social benefit, they can have several different purposes, which can be summarized generically in four large categories:

1 Fund raising objectives for specific social causes (such as seeking funding to support medical research or to support the construction or restoration of a collective building) 2 Advocacy processes to promote and find alliances on specific movements (such as

supporting an ecological cause or expanding the voluntary or mobilization base in an organization, promoting networks of institutions and associations or activities that pursue collective purposes)

3 Provide useful information to overcome any gap in access inequalities (such as the access to services of collective interest or to the use of certain technological tools)

7 Marketing and Strategy Terms: https://www.mbaskool.com/business-concepts/marketing-and-strategy- terms/11130-non-commercial-advertising.html

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4 Promote a change of behaviour of a group or a subgroup through specific strategies or with techniques of social marketing (such as promoting healthier lifestyles or prompting people to quit smoking, exercise more, eat better, not abuse alcohol, use drugs, and so forth)

(Pavanello 2013, 28)

As mentioned above, media, as means of symbolic mediation of social reality, are powerful shapers of social reality and they play a crucial role in the formation and development of public discussion. Social advertising gives us a representation of a specific reality, revealing the traces of a certain cultural, social, economic and political background concerning a country. Nonetheless, it also participates in the (non-neutral) definition of a public discussion, since it aims to build attention, consensus, visibility and relevance to specific issues (Gadotti, Bernocchi 2015, 27). The general message that this kind of advertising promotes is that there is no good individual life if the instances of private well-being do not meet those of collective well-being.

1.5.1 Origins of social advertising in the United States

In November 1941, the American advertiser James Webb Young, in a speech addressed to the American Association of Advertising Agencies, highlighted the importance of creating advertising for socially relevant purposes. From this mission (and following the entry of the United States into the Second World War), the War Ad Council was created in February 1942, with the purpose of promoting and supporting the war effort. The first campaign, in fact, encouraged citizens to buy war titles to finance the American army. The campaign was so successful that the program continued even after the war, with the consequent change of the name of the organization, which simply became Ad Council, and becoming one of the main creators of social advertising in the United States. For over 70 years, in fact, the organization has developed campaigns on the most varied topics of social relevance, such as bullying, disability, obesity, among others⁸.

8 Inside Marketing: https://www.insidemarketing.it/glossario/definizione/pubblicita-sociale/

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1.5.2 Origins of social advertising in Italy

The desire to create an initiative similar to the Advertising Council in Italy was manifested during a conference held in Milan in 1958, but the idea took shape only in the early 70s, with the creation of the foundation Pubblicità Progresso (Gadotti, Bernocchi 2015, 35). In 1971, Pubblicità Progresso launched the first campaign, focused on blood donation, which achieved enormous success. With over 40 years of history, the "foundation for social communication" has created campaigns with very varied themes: from incentives to volunteering and the protection of children and the elderly to organ donation, gender equality and environmental sustainability⁹. The aim of the association consists in demonstrating the usefulness of a professional advertising intervention to promote correct social communication and stimulate civil conscience to act for a common good (Puggelli 2003, 5).

1.6 Social advertising production process

By “advertising production process” we mean the activities involved in the creation of an advertising campaign, from the decision to use it as a communication tool that responds to the promoter's objectives, up to its technical realization, the consequent transmission to the media and its final evaluation. Each advertising communication process involves, on the one hand, the promoters (companies, public bodies or non-profit organizations) which constitute the demand of the advertising market, on the other, it involves various subjects that provide services and specific skills related to advertising (agencies, graphic studios, professionals, production companies, media centres and so on), which make up the offer (Gadotti, Bernocchi 2015, 48). This advertising production process is used, albeit with some differences, for both commercial and social advertising. The latter will be the focus of our analysis. Gadotti and Bernocchi in La pubblicità sociale. Maneggiare con cura (2015, 48) identify 10 key phases into which the process of creating a social advertising campaign can be divided and analysed:

1 The promotion phase, which is the beginning of the advertising production process.

The promoter identifies in advertising the most suitable tool to pursue its marketing and communication objectives. During this phase, the administration decides to use

9 Inside Marketing: https://www.insidemarketing.it/glossario/definizione/pubblicita-sociale/

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an advertising campaign to intervene in support of the solution of the great social problems affecting the community or to respond promptly to emergency situations, in the common interest or of a specific category of people it intends to protect.

2 The administrative phase, which consists in the selection of the advertising budget and has to do with the so-called minimum visibility threshold, the value below which there is a risk that the campaign will not reach the desired level of visibility or memorization. In social advertising productions, most non-profit organizations do not go through a real administrative moment, as the promoters rely on the free availability of external suppliers. Therefore, most social campaigns promoted by non-profit organizations struggle to reach the minimum visibility threshold. For example, if we look at the main Italian periodicals and newspapers, the social announcements are often published with limited continuity and in small numbers (Gadotti, Bernocchi 2015, 51). Social campaigns promoted by the public administration are different. To the major issues of social interest, such as the problem of drugs and road safety, the administration allocates a fair amount of resources.

3 The organizational phase, which is the moment when the promoter entrusts the development of the advertising process to internal and external professionals, such as advertising or communication agencies.

4 The strategic phase, which has the purpose to determine in which context the promoter operates, what objectives its advertising campaign has and through which methodologies and arguments it intends to use, and which target audience the ads will address.

5 The creative phase, which consists in creating the idea which will then be transformed into the actual advertisement. Usually this process is entrusted to a copywriter and an art director, who deal relatively with the texts and with the graphic and visual aspects.

6 The legal phase, which consists in verifying the legal validity of the ideas for the campaign before presenting the creative proposals to the client.

7 The production and technological phase, in which the creation of the advertising begins, after the approval of the creative idea by the client. The advertising campaign will then be transferred to media suitable for the transmission and/or publication of messages.

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8 The media phase, which consists in planning and purchasing of spaces on the media on which the advertising campaign will be published or transmitted (such as spaces in newspapers, television, websites, social media and so forth). Gadotti and Bernocchi (2015, 64) divide the planning choices according to three variables: the reach (the target quota), the frequency (the number of times that an advertising message reaches each recipient) and the continuity (the time interval between the messages).

9 The phase of transmission of the message, where the agency must check the quality of the transmitted message and, if necessary, intervene with any corrections. The analyses are carried out on different levels, such as by examining the viewing figures, the accesses to the web-site, the requests for information and, more generally, by checking the response of the target audience to the advertising message(s).

10 The research phase is the moment which accompanies the entire production process of an advertising campaign. It is aimed both at evaluating the results that a given campaign brings and at planning new actions. The research can have a qualitative or quantitative focus based on its goal, and it can be carried out in various ways such as through professional talks, play-based interviews and focus groups. This phase is particularly complicated, as there is no real objective definition of advertising effectiveness. In fact, the primary goals of advertisements can be varied, the responses of the interviewees and their behaviour in receiving the message are very often influenced by the widespread social orientation regarding a specific issue, and, finally, an appreciable campaign from a stylistic point of view does not always succeed to stimulate reflections and real effects.

(Gadotti, Bernocchi 2015, 28)

The result of this strategic path aimed at creating an advertising campaign defines a selection of generic and specific media on which to circulate the advertising message (for example, television would be generic media, while the television channel chosen would be the specific vehicle through which the ad is broadcasted). Then a choice of times, dates, times and formats through which the message will try to reach the target, also known as flow chart, is made (Gadotti, Bernocchi 2015, 65).

It must be admitted that, despite the possibility of analysing data through scientific procedures, evaluative research on social messages is the result of processes and activities

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based mainly on subjective impressions, common sense and on the use and adaptation of professional standards used in communication advertising (ibid., 78). Interpersonal communication itself is known to be very often based on personal subjectivity and interpretation (de-coding).

1.7 Language and paralanguage

To fully understand how advertising communication works, it is necessary to understand what communication is and what it consists of. In fact, a language can have many different levels of analysis and interpretation, which play an important role in communicative discourses. Language is usually given though marks on a surface of sounds in air, which are respectively the graphetic and phonetic substance (Cook 2001, 64). Each of these substances gives rise to two different kinds of meaning concurrently: on the one hand, the substance is perceived as the sounds or letters of a particular language (the phonology or graphology) which in turn form words and word combinations (the morphology and grammar) which are in turn perceived as meaningful (the semantics). However, the substance which carries language is also the vehicle of another kind of meaning, conveyed simultaneously by voice quality, or choice of script, letter size, tone of voice and so forth. The latter kind of meaning, which occurs together with linguistic meaning, is called paralinguistic meaning (Ibid.).

Paralanguage is a term which also embraces other meaningful behaviours that accompanies language but do not carry it, such as gesturing, facial expression, body posture, eye contact, or the way writing is bound or displayed (Cook 2001, 64). Important linguistic theories such as the work of the swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussurre (1857-1913) and the semiotic theory of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) laid the foundations for a more complete linguistic analysis, thanks to the understanding that mere graphetic or phonetic symbols are not the only carriers of meaning. It is important to stress that the two modes of meaning, language and paralanguage are not separate. In fact, paralanguage interacts with language and on several occasions can prevail by completely changing how a message is understood and interpreted (ibid.). Paralanguage behaviour has therefore the power to mould verbal behaviour and change the overall effect of a communication. Its function is often to express attitudes and emotions, to regulate and establish social relations and to meditate between words and a situation (Cook 2001, 76).

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Advertising, like many other types of discourse, carries a large part of its meaning paralinguistically and it makes great use of iconicity and culturally constructed meanings in to convey messages. Therefore, an analysis of advertising campaigns will not be complete with a linguistics which excludes attention to paralanguage. In fact, we must take into consideration that communication methods have evolved along with technology and, in fact, the concept of reading or listening have changed with the influence of technology, also due to the growing desire for a quick transmission of information. Paralinguistic forms and modes of communication other than language have now become a conspicuous part of communication.

1.8 Multimodality in advertising

Modern communication is carried out through complex processes, which are achieved not only through language, but also through a variety of other modes, including image, gaze, gesture, movement, music, speech and sound effects, which simultaneously contribute to the overall meaning and interpretation of the message. Along with the interconnectedness of different media, the rhetorical delivery and the audience are influenced also by the modern computer-based technologies, which are designed to make new kind of textual products possible. In his work Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication (2010), Gunther Kress describes the concept of mode as a “socially and culturally given semiotic resource for making meaning”, and he stresses how “[i]mage, writing, layout, music, gesture, speech, moving image, soundtrack and 3D objects are examples of modes used in representation and communication” (Kress 2010, 29).

Modern advertising campaign are now very often promoted through different modes simultaneously, also depending on their target audience and on their main purpose(s). This phenomenon is also known as multimodality.

Multimodality is an inter-disciplinary approach that understands communication and representation to be more than about language. It has been developed over the past decade to systematically address much-debated questions about changes in society, for instance in relation to new media and technologies¹⁰.

10 Institute of Education: https://mode.ioe.ac.uk/2012/02/16/what-is-multimodality/

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Kress defines multimodality as a theory which looks at how people communicate and interact with each other, not just through writing (which is one possible mode) but also through other many other different modes¹¹. Given the variety of modes a communicative act may use, different modes can be used to do specific semiotic work. Multimodality is thus the application of multiple literacies, or modes, within one medium which contribute to an audience's understanding of a message (Kress, 2010).

The increasingly growing interaction between different communicative modes and the combination of specific images, the organization of the content and the chosen method of delivery are themselves part of the production of meaning. This interconnection between modes can change the way an audience receives and perceives information. The most basic understanding of language comes via semiotics, which is the association between words and symbols, however, a multimodal text changes its semiotic effect by placing words (with preconceived meanings) in a new context, which can be audio, visual, or digital. The re- contextualisation of a text within different mediums creates a different sense of perception and understanding for the audience, and this new type of learning can be controlled by the type(s) of media used for the promotion of a message (ibid.).

A linguistic text can be extremely altered by multimodality, especially when several mediums are juxtaposed to create a special experience or meaning. If the text is interactive (such as in a website or promotional video), the audience is facilitated to create their own meaning from the perspective that the multimodal text gives. In this way the deliverer can further engage the audience in creating comprehension and action. The use of different delivery modes in a message also manages to obscure the audience's concept of genre by creating grey areas out of what was once more specific. This creates a situation where the genre of multimodal texts is impossible to define, for it is dynamic, evolutionary, and ever- changing.

Video advertising touches all modes and media at once and must be thus understood and interpreted accordingly. Therefore, when analysing the chosen corpora, we will consider the interconnectedness between language and the visual aspects of the advertisements. “In an advertisement, for instance, it may be that the verbal text is studiously ‘non-sexist’, while

11 Learning Theories: https://www.learning-theories.com/multimodality-kress.html

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the visual text encodes overtly sexist stereotypes” (Kress 2006, 20). Multimodality is in fact part of the discourse of ads, and to ignore or lessen the effects of the existence of different interconnected modes would be a misinterpretation.

1.9 Context creation in advertising discourse

For an advertisement to be successful, it must achieve the objectives that were set by the promoter during the strategic phase. The delivery of new texts has radically changed along with technological influence, and the construction of a message now consists of the anticipation of future remediation. Promoters think about the type of audience a text will be written for and anticipate how that text might be interpreted. This allows for an audience to be involved in a public conversation, adding their own intentionality to the original product.

This means that it is not only important to choose and use an appropriate language and a captivating screenplay to realise a good ad, but it is also fundamental to create a reality that appeals to a specific audience through the most suitable means of communication. As mentioned above, a way to categorise advertisements is to focus on the consumer to whom they are (supposed to be) addressed, since selection of a target audience is crucial for an advertisement to achieve its purpose(s). In fact, in order to be addressed to and please a specific target, ads’ promoters need to establish a certain type of relationship with consumers and create a context in which a certain audience can identify. Ideas we receive about the world through advertising are all driven by who the advertisers think is likely to react to the ad and how that group needs to perceive itself in order to change their behaviour (Goddard 2002, 70). For this reason, “fictional worlds” are constructed in advertising discourse by making specific linguistic choices and using specific features of context, which are crucial in the determination of said relation between sender(s) and target audience(s) (Hidalgo- Downing 2000, 68).

The concept of linguistic choice is fundamental, as choices made in discourse at the different linguistic levels (namely lexis, morphology, syntax and phonology) are significant as they determine the construction of different meanings (Halliday 1973, 1994 in Hidalgo- Downing 2000, 68). These different meanings are processed contextually, and the appropriateness of a given message will depend on the relation between the linguistic choices made and the features of context (Hidalgo-Downing 2000, 68). With the term context we

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