Discourse of advertising

Abstract

It is not an overstatement to say that these days we are saturated with advertising. We do not even need to enter a commercial space such as a shopping mall or flick through a glossy magazine where we can reasonably expect some advertising practices taking place; public spaces that traditionally had nothing to do with commercial activities such as university buildings, clinics and hospitals all display adverts of many kinds. Every time we do searches on Google, read an online newspaper, or open a social media site, we are immediately bombarded with adverts or branded content of some sort that try to attract our attention and make us click, like, share or download something. In times of late capitalism, mass production and information overload, advertising has become the key marketing tool for attracting attention and converting non-consumers to consumers, making it an all-pervasive form of discourse. Although advertising has a well-defined and easily recognizable purpose (generating revenues), it comes in a variety of discursive, generic and semiotic manifestations. This makes advertising an important and fertile but also challenging ground for a corpus-based (critical) discourse analysis. This chapter reviews contributions of corpus-based research to our understanding of the discourse of advertising. It begins by a brief overview of some of the major developments in advertising including some of its controversial practices. Subsequently, research studies that have used a corpus approach to investigating aspects of advertising are reviewed. This is extended by a focal analysis, which demonstrates how corpus tools can be effectively adopted to explore discursive practices of new forms of digital advertising. The focus is on native ads. The chapter concludes with observations regarding opportunities and limitations of a corpus-based discourse analysis to study advertising and discusses avenues for future research.