New forms of textuality in advertising communication: discourses, practices and narratives

editors Cinzia Bianchi, Marianna Boero and Ruggero Ragonese.

deadline: 30 September 2024

The advertising text has often been the subject of semiotic studies. From its earliest analyses in the 1960s to its most recent applications, semiotics has always found advertising an extremely propitious opportunity to test its tools, in an attempt to identify its specificity in relation to the other human and social sciences.
The mutability of advertising discursive forms has been a challenge for semiotics, opening reflections and prompting debates on the potentiality, limits and relevance of semiotic analytical tools. This aspect appears particularly interesting within the dynamics of the contemporary communicative context, characterized by the advent of social advertising, the contamination between different media, the entry of new technologies and the spread of Artificial Intelligence in consumer practices, fruition and production of advertising texts. It is therefore possible to observe, on the one hand, the appearance of new forms of textuality that accompany the conventional forms of advertising communication, sanctioning the transition from spot to post-spot; on the other hand, the strategies for adapting advertising discourse to innovative modes of fruition, such as apps which inscribe within them a different user profile, in a relation based on comments, reproductions, and substitutions between one medium and another. The focus thus shifts from the analysis of media specificities induced by digital media to the analysis of network discourse, opening up new frontiers for the advertising text, which increasingly changes its expressive modalities to adapt to new contexts. What are the effects of this change on the forms of advertising textuality? What are the characteristics of advertising textuality induced by digital media and how can the traditional analytical categories of semiotics confront them?

We invite you to contribute to this issue of Ocula starting from similar questions and on the awareness of a paradox: today there is nothing more used, abused, and ultimately 'old' than the term new associated with the concept of text. In the last twenty years, practice and research have demonstrated that what appears to be a ‘new form of textuality' is likely to grow old in the time of the organization of a conference or publishing project. One wonders whether it is not time to abandon the idea of novelty in the panorama of textual studies applied to advertising communication and to acknowledge that in the digital age we are no longer faced with discrete events that revolutionize discursive forms but rather with a continuous, rhizomatic, multidimensional evolution that multiplies the viewpoints and possibilities of textual phenomena. But while this is true, it is also true that the term 'new' still grants us two fundamental levels of analysis: the first, which we might call extensive, allows us to define a multifaceted and polyform landscape that tests its own boundaries and limits in the face of every innovation; the second level, which we might call intensive, reminds us that the pervasiveness of new digital technologies prompts a continuous reflection on the concept of textuality and its potential in the face of everchanging challenges.


Possible lines of research:

- Semiotic methodology for the analysis of new forms of advertising textuality
- Authorship and mystification in new advertising narratives
- Cinema, advertising and the new digital frontiers
- Advertising, social networks and new media
- Advertising and branding strategies in the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Advertising, imagery and brand communication
- Semiotics and new trends in marketing

Deadlines
Abstracts Proposal: 15/03/2024
Notification of acceptance of Abstract: 30/03/2024
Submission of the essays: 15/06/2024
Notification of acceptance, rejection or revision request: 30/08/2024
Scheduled Publication: 15/01/2025

Accepted languages: Italian, English, French, Spanish

Abstracts and articles must be sent to:
Cinzia Bianchi: cinbianchi@gmail.com
Marianna Boero: mboero@unite.it
Ruggero Ragonese: ruggero.ragonese@unimore.it