The influence of the postmodern society’s values in discourse of television advertising

Abstract

This article is the result of an academic investigation work developed in 2006. The investigation is based on the idea that we are immersed in a postmodern society, which has some particular characteristics; one of them is the fact to generate a new kind of man, called postmodern or light.

The main objective of this investigation was to identify some of the basic characteristics of postmodern society, specially its values and customs, to realize if they have influenced in arguments that are frequently used to create television spots.
To develop the investigation we selected a corpus composed by ten spots shown in Argentina in the period between May 1998 and October 2005.
The selected spots belong to these advertisers: Renault Scenic, Sprite Light, Xenical, Yogurt Ser, Salchichas Ser, Hugo Boss Man, CTI Movil, Quattro Pomelo y Suzuki Fun. We made an exploratory investigation, and the technique we used was the content analysis.