Advertising in times of crisis – A semiotic analysis of some savvy creative approaches
Joseph SassoonAlphabet Research, Italy
INTRODUCTION
In the last ESOMAR Qualitative World Conference (Istanbul, November 2008) the author presented a new method combining the semiotics of the French School with the theories on storytelling coming from Hollywood screenwriters, and then applied it to the analysis of the so-called Helpers in advertising. This method can also be valuable in discovering what persuasion mechanisms are at play in advertising campaigns that appear to have made the most of the recent economic downturn. That is precisely what the paper...