A short-term diachronic perspective on political commercials as a hybridized genre: a multimodal critical discourse analysis

In today’s media-enhanced societies where news, opinions and entertainment constantly pervade the social space, political commercials remain the area in which politicians and institutions strive to construct an effective and credible image for themselves. As a genre, political commercials rely on the multimodal resources of fiction filmmaking, including script, visuals and performance; over the years, this genre has been able to distill political campaign themes into powerful visual and verbal messages and has contributed to construe what marketing theorists have recently defined as “nation branding” (Leonard 2002), i.e. a set of instruments employed to construct and improve a “competitive identity” (Anholt 2007) for politicians and institutions. Endorsing the assumption that new genres reflect major changes in communication purposes (Bhatia 1993), we contend, by means of a contrastive analysis between traditional and online electoral campaign practices, that novel forms of genre mixing/switching can also be gauged in the context of new media capabilities. To this purpose, we will collect and investigate a short-term diachronic corpus of video political commercials, which covers a time-span of 50 years (1950-2009).