Conceptual Blending in Advertisements

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,3, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen (Anglistik), course: Cognitive Linguistics, language: English, abstract: Everyday and everywhere we are surrounded by advertisement. 90% of it disappears in a blur of pictures and information, but sometimes a billboard or a television spot catches our attention. Due to mature markets many products and services are often exchangeable for the consumer. Advertisers reacted on this development by changing their strategies. Advertisement is not only providing information anymore, it is supposed to evoke emotions. Innovations like the internet have changed the marketing strategies as well. In order to always be more creative, more appealing, and more outstanding than the competition new advertising strategies have emerged. But what makes advertisement creative, interesting, outstanding? Apart from the product itself it is language and the symbols that are used to present the product. This is where the connection from advertisement to linguistics comes from. We know that conceptual blendings are important parts of many jokes, cartoons and of human imagination and thought in general. In order to show the wide range of ways blending can be used in advertisements, I chose examples from four different media: Print media, television, outdoor advertisement and viral advertisement. Since the perception of blends as well as advertisement always depends on the beholder I started a little survey, asking three persons for their reaction on the respective advertisement. In the beginning I am going to introduce and discuss the Conceptual Blending Theory. Then I am going to introduce the relevant advertisement techniques and my corpus. Finally I want to give my conclusion. In the appendix you can find pictures belonging to the respective campaigns.