Quanto vale un Rolex per Google? Premesse a una semiotica del marketing digitale

The paper addresses the role of a semiotic approach in the analysis of digital marketing, as well as the relevance of this field of study for the discipline. The paper briefly reconstructs the pivotal role of semiotics in the critical and strategic study of marketing - i.e. advertising - before the Internet (Barthes, Floch) and addresses the main issue in the semiotic analysis of marketing after the Internet: the problematic relationship of the discipline with technology; as a consequence, semiotics has mainly studied marketing online (marketing remediated by the Internet), rather than online marketing (marketing practices specific to the Internet). Afterwards, the paper presents a basic typology of online marketing, emphasizing its differences compared to traditional - i.e. offline - one. In the end, the paper presents some reflections on the linguistic political economy of online marketing, with a focus on its utmost prototype, Google Ads search campaigns.