COVID-19: The Advertising Confrotation in Different Countries

This article examines the peculiarities of the public advertising discourse of five cultures (Russia, the USA, the UK, France, and Australia) based on advertising campaigns concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. The main object of the research is poly-code structures that contain the interaction of multilevel and multidimensional components that appeared as a result of an interaction of elements belonging to different semiotic systems, both verbal and visual. The authors carry out complex multilevel discourse analysis, paying close attention to structural, semantic, communicative, and pragmatic features, including conceptual space. The article explores factors that ensure the efficiency of such influence on the mass addressee due to existing social procurement, taking a closer look at the pragmatics of lexical and grammatical means in the chosen interaction strategy of verbal and visual components in Russian and non-Russian social advertising texts. The author also studies the mechanisms of influence in various cognitive processes that are part of information perception and processing and analyses linguo-creative parameters of such texts, such as pragmatic aspects of the use of wordplay and its influence on the semantic structure of an advertising text. The research makes it possible to detect the semantic mechanisms of the increasing communicative effectiveness of public advertising. The structural and semantic compression that plays an important role in it is possible thanks to the use of nonverbal expressive means: print text features (size, colour, and other features of the font, kerning, and typography), expressive images, and their interaction with the printed text. The functioning of advertising texts is connected with a whole series of basic concepts that appear in advertising space, get into the public and personal mentality, and modify it. On the other hand, to increase their impact, advertisements use a range of pervasive stereotypes that can be observed in the way brands react to social changes in their logos and slogans.