Automobile Advertising for Cultural Elites: A Multimodal Analysis

This study focuses on the concepts of offer/demand and modality, which are key in articulating the interaction between the producer and the viewer of high-concept print advertisements. In particular, I apply them to the analysis of a Volkswagen Passat print ad published in the August 7&14, 2006 issue of the The New Yorker, the quintessential magazine for American cultural elites. The analysis of this multimodal text is conducted using the methodological tools of visual semiotics and multimodal communication (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996, 2001; van Leeuwen and Jewitt 2001), with references to the evaluative function of persuasive texts and the phenomenon of speaker opinion as developed by Susan Hunston (1999) and Monika Bednarek (2006) respectively. The analysis of both the image and the written text that compose the advertisement leads to two main conclusions. First, I shed light on the high level of consistency between the image and the written text, to the point that one semiotic system mirrors the other. Second, I illustrate how the ad aims to mould the car to the lifestyle and the worldview of the American cultural elites, rather than molding their lifestyle and a worldview to fit the car, as more traditional forms of print ads do. As part of a wider research project, this study is an attempt to lay the groundwork for the development --through the analysis of a representative corpus of print ads-- of a novel perspective on high-concept advertising.