Analyzing Communication in Television Adverts: The Case of MTN TV Advert “Eto’o Peut”

This paper examines how the advertiser uses modes of communication
in TV advertisements in an interactive way to communicate the
advertising message to the consumer. These modes of communication,
language, visuals, music, sound, and paralinguistic elements, are often
seen and studied as semiotic resources. Very few look at it from a
communication angle, that is, how they are used to pass the advertising
message to the consumer present in the advert. What is of interest to
them, is the structure of the semiotic resource, that is, the grammatical
and syntactic structures of the semiotic resources used. Some studies
have equally looked at each of these modes of communication
individually, forgetting that in a TV advert, they automatically interact to
share the message. This study is undertaken within the framework of
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) drawing from Multimodal Discourse
Analysis (MMDA), which provides methodological tools that are applied
in the analysis of the TV advert “Eto’o Peut”. The data of this study
consists of the linguistic, visual, musical, and non-verbal elements
obtained from the observation of the TV advert. The analysis shows that
the advertiser uses mostly nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs for
verbal communication, sound quality, rhythm, and pitch for musical
communication, contact and social distance for visual communication,
and dress code and tone for non-verbal communication. All these
communication devices interact to convey the advertising message to the
consumer.

Keywords: communication, modes of communication, advertising
message, Eto’o Peut, consumers.