Abstract

Advertisements in the media are polysemic and multimodal. The visuals, the music and the oral text (dialogues, narrations) constitute a unified whole; all these elements support each other. The advertiser does not state directly that we must obtain the advertising product but, rather, adopts a kind of a hidden communication. Barthes (1988) insists that the advertiser wants to replace the banal concept of “buying” with the display of a spectacular world, of an ideal way of life. In any case, an important role in advertising in the electronic mass media is played by music and by way in which the spoken word is delivered, as these may contribute to the general development of the viewer’s awareness, may give selective emphasis to certain aspects of the message, and may render the whole context more attractive. A unified whole is formed by the text of the announcement, the script or story-line, the sound effects, the music and the images, making the semiological analysis of television advertising a particularly complicated task. Despite increasing interest in research into consumer behaviour, the role of music and its link with the spoken word in advertising have not been researched in any notable breath or depth. In the present study, we examined a corpus of 391 television commercials, in search of the hidden relations among the music, the text, and the product that is being advertised. We focus on the functional role of music in the advertisement, on speech delivery (the speaker’s gender, the manner of delivery), and on the identification of certain choices to do with music and with the way texts are spoken, contributing to the promotion of the advertised product or service and to the reinforcement of the advertiser’s message.