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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1022

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Non-commercial advertising in Prague: promoting social issues in the public space

Authors: Kaderka, Petr
Submitted by: Kaderka, Petr (Institute of the Czech Language, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Czech Republic)

After 1989, Czech society has experienced a forceful invasion of advertising into its public space. People, especially inhabitants of large cities, have become targets of the diverse persuasive strategies and methods of commercial messages. Over the course of time, however, advertising companies have started to provide the occupied semiotic space, reserved until then for a single purpose—helping a company to increase its profit—, to subjects which are less aggressive and for a different purpose. Using diverse advertising forms, non-profit organisations, e.g. foundations, charities, religious groups, civic initiatives etc., have begun to address the public in order to promote their own views of social issues such as racism, human rights, the ill effects of smoking, environmental protection, child abuse and neglect, domestic violence, road safety etc.
In this paper, I will analyze non-commercial posters and billboards, published in the public space in Prague during 2001–2008, in terms of socially conditioned semiotics, genre and discourse. On the structural level, my primary orientation is toward characterizing the constitutive elements of the advertisements, the relationships between the semiotic modes utilized, and the relationship of advertisements to other texts and genres from the discursive world of Czech society. On the level of communicative processes, I examine the way in which sense is made of this type of advertising, using the method of focus groups (e.g. Myers 1998, 2004).
The central discursive feature of non-commercial posters and billboards seems to be their multimodality: the verbal, typographical and pictorial modes are employed to mutually contextualize the posters’ components, to fix and hierarchize their relevant social meanings and to constitute their ‘voices’ (Bakhtin 1984). Using photographic data and recordings and transcripts from the focus groups, I argue that genre hybridization and diversification, stemming from the formal and distributional proximity of commercial and non-commercial advertising, is a relevant aspect for recipients when they evaluate a poster or when they decide whether or not to engage in dialogue with the message.
References:
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.
Myers, Greg. 1998. Displaying opinions: Topics and disagreement in focus groups. Language in Society 27: 85–111.
Myers, Greg. 2004. Matters of Opinion: Talking about Public Issues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.