Advertising in times of crisis - A semiotic analysis of some savvy creative approaches

What is the right way to advertise in times of crisis? What changes compared to normal times?What must be said, and how? What kind of stories have to be told, so as to connect to a worriedconsumer? The presentation addresses these questions by a semiotic desk analysis of messagesadvertised in Western media from December 2008 to June 2009; that is, in a time of persistingrecession in all developed nations.

Advertising in times of crisis – A semiotic analysis of some savvy creative approaches

Joseph SassoonAlphabet Research, Italy

INTRODUCTION

In the last ESOMAR Qualitative World Conference (Istanbul, November 2008) the author presented a new method combining the semiotics of the French School with the theories on storytelling coming from Hollywood screenwriters, and then applied it to the analysis of the so-called Helpers in advertising. This method can also be valuable in discovering what persuasion mechanisms are at play in advertising campaigns that appear to have made the most of the recent economic downturn. That is precisely what the paper...

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