Reflecting the Modern Filipino Social Media Identity in the Visual and Lexico-Semantic Elements of Food Product Ads in Facebook

Authors: Cristy May Sistona (Mindanao State University, Iligan Institute of Technology, The Philippines)
Speakers: Cristy May Sistona
Strand: Semiotics and Semiology
Session Type: General Session

Abstract

The number of social media users around the world increases when COVID -19 started up until now .It is unsurprising then that the advertising industry also migrated to the digital landscape , creating and releasing advertisements to different social sites especially on Facebook that ranks as first with 2.740 billion monthly active users as of January of 2021. The increase in the number of people who are online is due to the restrictions being implemented because of the pandemic. Consumers then opted to order online instead of going out, and this is where the food advertisements come in, which is the focus of the present research. Using social semiotics, multimodality of Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) and the levels of analysis laid down by Opavsky (2016) , forty food advertisements were analysed through the following levels: visual, lexical and semantic levels to provide timplications regarding how modern Filipino social media identity is reflected and constructed in these advertisement.

Based from the analysis it was found out that majority of the images in the ads are in medium shot. This is equivalent to 20 ads or 50 percent of the corpus. As to the graphological analysis of the slogans, highest is the used of rhythm which corresponds to 41% or sixteen slogans identified. Whereas for the methods of coherence, the widely used is the exophoric reference with 25 occurrence or equivalent to 62.5 %. This means that most of the ads requires the viewers to have a shared experience in order to understand what has been portrayed. As to the language used in the slogans, most are using code mixing which means both Filipino and English are used within the slogan this is called Taglish or Englog. There are nineteen slogans which are written in Taglish that is equivalent to 47.5% . This is followed by slogans which are purely written in English with sixteen corpus tagged or 40% of the data. This result then, provided an implication that since majority of the slogans’ corpus are written in Taglish and followed by the use of solely English language , most then if not all of the online users of Facebook are inclined to code mix and to use English rather than consistently using Filipino language. There are also eighteen colloquial words identified that underwent the process of blending the two languages: English and Tagalog or the so called ‘Englog or Taglish.’

Keywords: Advertisements, Social semiotics, Multimodality, Social media.