A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Five Selected Online Bank Advertisements

Abstract

Language remains an indispensable tool used in the advertisement world to communicate. Advertisements as forms of communication are goal oriented; they are used to manipulate the viewers or listeners’ emotions not for the sole aim of entertainment but designed to achieve their persuasive goal of selling goods and services. The covid 19 outbreak had a big impact on several industries and the banking sector is not an exception. It is an undeniable fact that current advertising landscape poses a challenge to agencies, all round the world; hence businesses can still experience great result with digital advertising values for those who stay at home. Thus, the problem still remains that people do not look beyond the fascinating coated language, images, colour, gestures, and facial expression among others which have in –depth meaning. This paper investigates the different multimodal elements employed by Banks in the advertisement of their products and services on Facebook. Five screen-shot advertisements of five banks from Facebook were sampled and subjected to descriptive analysis. The Banks are, Access Bank, United Bank for Africa (UBA), First City Monument Bank (FCMB), First Bank of Nigeria and Guarantee Trust Bank (GT). The study is hinged on Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) theoretical approach to multimodal discourse which is heavily anchored on the systemic functional linguistic orientation of Halliday’s (1975) view of language as a social semiotic inspired studies on multimodal socio semiotic. The analysis revealed that bank advertisements are characterized by verbal and visual resources which include images, bold prints, capitalization, gothic writing, figures of speech, phrases, lexical acronym, quotes, punctuation marks and other graphological devices. It also revealed that colour, gesture, facial expression among others is also significant for meaning making of online Bank adverts. The paper concludes that some of these multimodal elements are embedded in the advert and they have persuasive effects on the audience even during the lock down situation.