The use of sexual controversy in South African advertising: A pragmatic analysis

This article is based on an investigation of printed South African advertisements in which sexual controversy is deliberately used as a strategy to draw attention. The dataset is a collection of Afrikaans- and English-medium advertisements selected from popular South African magazines published between 2000 and 2010. The purpose of the research is to offer an insight into the nature of controversy as a mechanism in the South African media and to categorise the dataset primarily by means of a pragmatic analysis to identify the implied marketing message. Controversy in the advertisements was associated with themes related to sex, such as nudity, sexism, health and safety issues, and indecent language usage. The research investigated the exploitation of pragmatic instruments, in order to evoke controversy in advertisements, such as the transgression of the conditions governing conversation according to Grice's (1989) Co-operative Principle and the maxims of conversation. A study of controversial advertising may offer a deeper understanding of modern society. As expected, the results indicate that sex still sells and that sexual controversy is by no means fixed or age and culturally bound. Moreover, the character of the advertisements is nowadays very often an intellectual game which requires the target market's cognitive involvement and inter-textual knowledge.