Stereotypes and humor in advertising discourse. The case of two television campaigns of V&T by Nestea

Abstract

All advertising discourse is created from argumentation mechanisms; however, these vary, generally, depending on the effectism sought, so that the basic patterns can be altered to produce a certain reaction in the recipient. This is the case of counter-argumentation and irony, which, humorously, pervade current audiovisual advertising. Counter-argumentative, refutatory and ironic advertising speeches are especially interesting at a sociolinguistic level, since the keys necessary to disambiguate the message lie in the topoi or common places shared by the speaking communities, and the addressee has to resort to them to capture the sense of the speech. The construction of stereotypes, so present in advertisements, also depends on knowledge of the world, society and culture. Advertising recreates stereotypes as a strategy for selecting the audience and mimicking the recipient, so that it produces an immediate identification, which captures their attention and arouses their interest in the product. In this way, the audiovisual advertising discourse is created according to stereotypical social behavior patterns that are reflected not only through the image but also in the linguistic manifestations, which try to emulate those of the stereotype portrayed. This is shown by the discursive analysis carried out from two advertising campaigns for the same product, V&T by Nestea: one of them aimed at a female audience and the other, at a male audience; where it is appreciated how the communicative strategies are adapted to the addressee to build a discourse that is linguistically associated with the stereotype and produces the identification between both.