Grabbing attention: the importance of modal density in advertising

Abstract

This article compares marketing communications mediated by conventional media (street posters) with those employing a convergence of old and new technologies (posters, SMS texting, Bluetooth transmitters). The author first analyses in detail the famous Lord Kitchener poster created in 1914 and shows that the semiotic and modal structure of the Kitchener poster became a template on which many subsequent communications have been and still are based. He then goes on to compare the semiotic and modal structure of the famous Kitchener poster with the New Zealand Army interactive recruitment posters created by Saatchi & Saatchi (New Zealand) in 2007. Building on Rodney Jones’s notion of sites of engagement as sites of attention and using Sigrid Norris’s concept of modal density, this article analyses the New Zealand Army interactive posters and shows how communications in the age of information overload are more likely to be successful if they find new ways of getting and keeping attention. Furthermore, it suggests that multimodal discourse analysis can have an important and, as yet unrealized, role to play in refining the study of advertising and marketing communications effectiveness.