Messages and discursive practices in tobacco advertising: a generic perspective

Messages and discursive practices in tobacco advertising: a generic perspective If advertising is typically subject to the influence of society’s predominant values, tensions and preoccupations, mirroring contemporary life in its best and worst aspects, this is particularly true for tobacco advertising. While until few decades ago it was not dissimilar from the advertising of any other consumer product, in more recent times the debate over tobacco’s detrimental effects proven in scientific research, and the numerous lawsuits brought against tobacco companies have had a substantial impact on the techniques and discursive practices it deploys. This paper takes an essentially diachronic perspective, focusing on the advertising campaigns of Philip Morris for the Marlboro brand from the 1920’s to the turn of the millennium, using it as a case study to analyse the evolution of advertising genres under the pressure of changes in society and of new values that have emerged because of advances in scientific research and their reception by institutions and by the public at large. The corpus examined collects over 130 different print ads of Marlboro cigarettes, extracted from the Tobacco Archives Website and the Tobacco Legacy Library, published since 1927, mostly in American newspapers and magazines, and occasionally in the form of billboards and posters. Some of the ads were also used in international campaigns. As linguistic analysis in itself is inadequate to account for all the components that are at work in advertising messages – be they printed, broadcast, televised, posted in billboards or circulated through the internet – any analysis of this type of communicative event cannot avoid taking into due consideration the visual / iconic component. In the present study this is done whenever necessary or advisable, mainly using tools developed within the framework of the so called ‘Multimodal Discourse Analysis’, but the main focus is on the linguistic component, which is analysed in a discourse-analytical framework. Special attention is paid to the evolution of generic conventions in this specific area of advertising under the pressures exerted upon it by the new perception of tobacco as a ‘killer’ product and the numerous judicial and legislative measures taken in many countries to regulate the sale and labelling of tobacco products, and restrict or ban their advertising. Looking diachronically at the advertising campaigns of one large single company over time makes it possible to identify the strategic choices made by the company and account for them in terms of their purposes at each single stage and of the market segment targeted, while at the same time considering the social/societal factors playing a role in their design. References Barthes, Roland 1984. Rhetoric of the image. In Barthes, Roland Image Music Text (selected and translated by S. Heath). London: Fontana, 32-51. Brierley, Sean 2002. Advertising Handbook. 2nd Ed. London: Routledge (11996). Burnett, Leo 1958. The Marlboro Story. How One of America’s Most Popular Filter Cigarettes Got That Way. The New Yorker Magazine, November 1958. Carrier, Jim 2005. Marlboro Man at 50 -- Icon or illusion? San Francisco Chronicle, 07/01/2005 Kress, Gunther / van Leeuwen, Theo 1996/2001. Multimodal Discourse. London: Arnold. McRury, Iain 2008. Advertising. London: Routledge. Van Leeuwen ,Theo / Jewitt, Carey 2001. Handbook of Visual Analysis. London: Sage. Pateman, Trevor 1983. How is understanding of an advertisement possible? In Davis, Howard / Walton, Paul (eds) Language, Image, Media. Oxford: Blackwell, 187-204. Tobacco Archives <http://www.tobaccoarchives.com/> Tobacco Legacy Library, <http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/> Vestergaard, Torben and Schrøder, Kim 1985. The Language of Advertising. Oxford: Blackwell. Williamson, Judith 1983. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Marion Boyars.