Advertising Campaigns as Voices in Discourses

Discourse-linguistic studies of advertising texts as a voice of discourse in transtextual, thematic contexts are rare, despite the omnipresence of advertising and its potential for cultural control. And advertising is certainly associated with political partisanship or potential for social discussion beyond the individual advertising campaign. Using the example of Aldi Sad's out-of-home and digital campaign ALDInativIos, which ran parallel to the 2017 federal election, the article focuses on the intertextual dovetailing and overlapping of the knowledge domains of politics and business. The case study provides an illustrative discourse-linguistic analysis of advertising posters and their text-space relationships, of leaflets, from forum communication to corporate blogs, as well as of Twitter and Facebook communication with regard to intertextual references. It examines material from the public political debates during the 2017 federal election campaign, which was characterised by a general disaffection with politics and antagonism towards the established parties among the population. In the example analysed here, the momentum of the voice in the discourse is apparent from the fact that the users transfer the advertising to current political events. The users take the advertising campaign as an opportunity to express political views, which allows us to reconstruct a network of intertextual and intermodal references.