The relationship between a medium and ad- ad-vertisingad-vertising

In this section, I outline an approach to advertising and media within the developed framework. I argue that in the model of multimodal structure, the genre and the advertisements need to be separated due to their structural and functional differences. They both contribute to the artefact in terms of content and structure, but their contribution should not be collapsed into a single entity. To explain my view, I begin with a generic description of advertising from a multimodal perspective.

6.2.1 A multimodal perspective to advertising

In the contemporary consumer society, advertising may be broadly defined as an activity that encourages the consumption of goods, services and information. At the same time, advertising is a multifaceted phenomenon that may be approached from purely economic standpoints, or alternatively, it may be described as a series of complex semiotic and psychological operations to persuade both individuals and groups. By using the word ‘complex’, particularly in connection with the term

‘semiotic’, I wish to underline that advertising is not a simple, straightforward process of communication between the advertiser and the consumer. Instead, the persuasive goals are often pursued through indirect discourse (cf. Crook 2004;

Catenaccio 2008), across a variety of media (cf. Lemke 2009; White 2010, 2012), and most importantly, by using multiple semiotic modes (see e.g. Cheong 2004;

Hopearuoho and Ventola 2009; Tan 2009; Feng 2011; Mart´ınez Lirola and Chovanec 2012).

Advertising has been also studied from a semiotic perspective outside the field of mainstream multimodal research (see e.g. Forceville 1996; Beasley and Danesi 2002; Van Mulken et al. 2010; Mart´ınez-Camino and P´erez-Saiz 2012; Lagerwerf et al. 2012). The contribution of multimodal research, in turn, may be said to be an increased understanding of the semiotics of advertising on different levels of abstraction. For example, Royce (1998), Cheong (2004) and Feng (2011) have provided detailed descriptions of meaning-making in printed advertisements. On a more abstract level, O’Halloran and Lim (2009) and Berazhny (2012) have con-tributed broad descriptions of the advertisements in the medium of a magazine.

Again, the notion of a medium brings us to the issue at hand: our knowledge of advertising within the medium of a brochure is limited, which provides a challenge for modelling the structure of a multimodal artefact.

In order to meet this challenge, I propose that within a model of artefact structure, advertising should be considered to be a medium-based phenomenon.

This distinguishes the contribution of advertising from the structure of a multi-modal artefact and separates the advertisements from the genres that are carried in the deployed medium. However, I want to emphasise that this does not rule out studying specific kinds of advertisements as a genre in other contexts (see e.g.

car advertisements in Hopearuoho and Ventola 2009; Feng 2011). For this disser-tation, however, separating the genre and the advertisements is necessary, because advertising is driven by decisions related to marketing strategies that attempt to reach the potential consumers who also have an interest in the deployed genre.

The semiotic choices made in the advertisements are of secondary concern and largely differ from the choices made in the genre: I will now elaborate my view below.

The advertisements have the potential to be realised in a medium, if the com-bination of the medium and the genres affords advertising. This constraint needs to be set out clearly, because certain combinations do not afford advertising. Con-sider, for instance, factual and fictive genres realised in the medium of a book.

For example, this dissertation does not have classified advertisements, except for scholarly purposes (cf. Figure 6.3). This does not, however, prevent all forms of advertising: it may also be implicit and ‘embedded’, such as in the case of product placement (Berazhny 2008). Alternatively, advertising may be explicit and take up parts of the layout space (cf. O’Halloran and Lim 2009; Berazhny 2012). In the following discussion, I will focus on these explicit forms of advertising.

To exemplify the phenomenon, let us first consider advertising in the medium of a printed newspaper. For instance, Lemke (2005, p. 46) suggests that adver-tisements constitute a multimodal genre in the newspapers. He writes:

The printed advertisement is a genre that we might argue obligatorily includes an image as well as a text that has a full organizational struc-ture of its own (as opposed to being merely a labelling or gloss on an image).

We already possess a considerable amount of knowledge about the multimodal characteristics of both printed and digital newspapers (see e.g. Ventola 2005; Knox 2007; Bateman et al. 2007; Caple 2009a; Caple and Bednarek 2010) and their perception (Holsanova and Holmqvist 2006). If our knowledge of newspapers is contrasted with our knowledge of multimodality in advertising, it should become clear — as Lemke argued above — that we are dealing with two different types of semiotic phenomena: the genre of a newspaper and the genre of newspaper adver-tisements, both of which have different communicative goals. Most importantly, both have their own multimodal organisation in terms of structure. This is pre-cisely why their contribution needs to be separated when modelling the structure of a multimodal artefact, because collapsing these contributions will result in the loss of analytical focus, if two distinct forms of semiosis are treated as one.

A further example may be drawn from a study of in-flight magazines as a mixed genre, which combines both editorial and advertising content as a “blend of travel brochure, lifestyle magazine, corporate catalogue and information leaflet”

(Thurlow and Jaworski 2003, p. 584). In relation to multimodality, Thurlow and Jaworski suggest that the magazines are “spatially integrated texts” that “appear to be heterogeneous in drawing from different publishing genres, while at the same time being extremely consistent in how they do that” (2003, p. 585). Curiously, Thurlow and Jaworski (2003, p. 585) consider the mix of genres and the consistent multimodal organisation as paradoxal: let us now evaluate this statement in more detail.

It may be argued that the above statement by Thurlow and Jaworski results from a failure to account for the complexity of the in-flight magazine as a multi-modal artefact. This, in turn, is a direct consequence of collapsing the different contributing factors into a single notion of genre. In this case, a clearly formu-lated notion of the magazine as a medium would have provided a more informed perspective into what exactly comes together in an in-flight magazine in terms of the genres and the semiotic modes. As Bateman (forthcoming, p. 12) points out, a medium such as a magazine may carry an unlimited number of genres, but the medium is simultaneously constrained by production, consumption and genre constraints, which also result in the kind of “consistent” structuring of meaning, as described above by Thurlow and Jaworski (2003, p. 585).

Finally, I will draw on yet another example from outside of the current field of investigation. The co-existence of advertisements is also a common feature in con-nection with dynamic, audiovisual discourse. In concon-nection with filmic (Bateman

and Schmidt 2012) and telecinematic (Piazza et al. 2011) discourse, the advertise-ments which precede, interrupt or follow the unfolding discourse are not considered as a part of the analysed filmic or telecinematic artefact.⁴ This view is precisely the same I advocate for studying the structure of printed multimodal artefacts, that is, the clear separation of the genres and the advertisements. With the de-scription of advertising now complete, I shall proceed to investigate the occurrence of advertisements in the entire data set.

6.2.2 Advertising in the tourist brochures

In order to establish a perspective into advertising in the tourist brochures, I analysed the entire data set to determine whether the instances of data included layout space for advertisements or not. For print media, there are two established categories for describing advertisements. The first category is that of display ad-vertisements, which occupy an entire page. Display advertisements have been frequently analysed in previous multimodal research (Royce 1998; Cheong 2004;

O’Halloran and Lim 2009; Feng 2011). The second category consists of classified advertisements, which are smaller in size and organised according to the products and services they offer. Figure 6.3 shows classified advertisements in theWeekend Delight in Helsinki brochure, published in 2006, which advertise a range of dif-ferent products, using an equally wide range of graphic, typographic and layout choices (cf. Lemke 2005, p. 46).

Because the tourist brochures themselves constitute a form of marketing and advertising (Molina and Esteban 2006), the following criteria were used to distin-guish between display and classified advertisements in the data:

1. The advertisements occupy their own layout area and can be clearly distin-guished from the main content of the tourist brochures.⁵

2. The advertised service or product is not directly affiliated with the publisher of the tourist brochure.

As Figure 6.2 shows, the classified advertisements appear in the data only after the year 2000 (n = 89). Moreover, all of the brochures with classified advertise-ments are staple-bound and most have a high number of content pages.⁶ This should not come as a surprise, as these brochures have more content space avail-able: the notion of “selling media” — that is, advertising space — is nowadays an established field of business (see e.g. Warner 2009). The benefits are obvious,

4In this connection, it is also important to note the role of product placement in film as a another means of ‘colonising’ a medium (see e.g. Scolari 2009).

5In addition, advertisements typically need to be recognisable and adhere to legal require-ments. For a case study of this issue in Russia, see Berazhny (2012).

6SHE 2002; HYW 2003, 2005, 2006;WDH 2006;HVG 2008.

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70

1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010

number of content pages

without classified advertisements with classified advertisements

Figure 6.2: The distribution of advertisements in the tourist brochures because selling advertising space may compensate publishing costs and enables the advertisers to tap into the lucrative tourist market, valued worldwide at 740 billion euro in 2011 (World Tourism Organization 2012).

In addition, the inclusion of classified advertisements may broaden the overall function of the tourist brochures. Several advertisements in Figure 6.3 offer a discount to the holder of the brochure, thereby expanding the brochure’s functions.

The brochure does not only inform and advertise, but also directly encourages the consumption of goods and services by simultaneously functioning as a discount coupon. The brochure acknowledges this explicitly:

This brochure has been designed to help you enjoy Helsinki without having to spend unnecessary amount of time planning your next move.

Besides useful information about places to go and things to do, you will find plenty of valuable offers from local shops, restaurants and tour operators. Helsinki Expert coupons should be presented for discounts when purchasing. Other discounts you can claim by simply presenting this brochure at the point of purchase.⁷

This observation may be of interest for marketing researchers, but the additional function of the brochures does not make a difference in the structure of the artefact, because this function arises from the classified advertisements, whose structure is not described within this dissertation.

7WDH 2006: u-1.12 to u-1.15.

Figure 6.3: Classified advertisements in Weekend Delight in Helsinki (2006) To conclude, given the relatively low number of brochures with advertisements (n = 6), the main concern of this dissertation should continue to be the multimodal structure of the tourist brochure as an artefact. With the basic characteristics of the medium thus established, I now turn to describe the semiotic modes available in the medium. Obviously, these semiotic modes comprise the written language and various types of images. In particular, previous research has emphasised the role of the visual in the tourist brochures (see e.g. Scarles 2004; Garrod 2009;

Jokela 2011). For instance, Scarles (2004, p. 45) observes that:

Brochures are highly visual in nature and rely upon images and pho-tographs to sell destinations as tourist places become immersed in the language of visuals.

In the following section, I investigate whether the annotated corpus agrees with this observation. The aim is to uncover the distribution of verbal and visual content in the data, which has been assumed to have favoured the visual in the recent years.