This article researches the main concepts identified in Kazakhstani and English-language public service advertising examples. Recently, public service advertising has been studied by various scholars in the fields of journalism, discourse analysis, and cognitive linguistics. The article aims at investigating the conceptual influence of public service advertising produced in Kazakhstan and English-speaking countries. For this purpose, several public service announcements have been selected and analyzed from the conceptual viewpoint. The feedback given on those advertisements was researched with the help of sentiment analysis. As a result, the main concepts of the selected samples were found, and their effect was defined. The outcomes of the research may be applied to the study of public service advertising from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.
Keywords: public service advertising, concept, conceptual influence, cognitive linguistics, verbalization
В статье рассматриваются основные концепты, найденные в казахстанской и англоязычной социальной рекламе. В последнее время социальная реклама широко исследуется в различных сферах: в журналистике, в анализе дискурса, в когнитивной лингвистике. Цель данной статьи — изучить концептуальное влияние социальной рекламы, произведенной в Казахстане и в англоговорящих странах. Для этого были отобраны примеры социальной рекламы. Данные примеры были проанализированы с концептуальной точки зрения. Комментарии к выбранной социальной рекламе также были изучены. В результате были определены основные концепты выборки, и удалось выявить их эффект на зрителей. Результаты исследования могут быть применены в дальнейшем изучении социальной рекламы с перспективы когнитивной лингвистики.
Ключевые слова: социальная реклама, концепт, концептуальное воздействие, когнитивная лингвистика, вербализация
Introduction
Advertisement is one of the most important fields of human activity. Apart from convincing customers to buy certain products, it creates a unique field for exploration which has been attracting the attention of researchers for many decades. According to G. Nikolajschvili, social advertisement uses multiple channels of influence, including visual impression and conceptual impact [1]. The choice of words, obviously, affects the way an advertisement is going to be perceived. Customers are more likely to react to the concepts which are familiar to them and activate certain areas in their cognition. Those concepts may be presented explicitly or implicitly. Verbalization plays a certain role here, being the factor of influence as well.
As Tomskaya believes, social advertising (or public service announcement) is a specific type of advertisement whereby “not goods and services are advertised, but the actions of people, capable of resolving social problems” [2]. In Russian and Kazakh research this field of advertisement is addressed as “social advertisement”, which reflects its non-commercial character and underlines its importance for the society. In English, however, another term is widely used: “public service announcement” or “public service advertising”, both acronymized as “PSA”. Hence, we proceed to use this term to describe the advertisement examples related to social problems and conflicts.
In general, public service announcement is understood as a call for action, as Alyson J. Crozier believes [3]. Here is an incomplete list of problems which are reflected in this type of advertisement:
— drug abuse and drug dealing;
— domestic abuse;
— harassment;
— violence towards children;
— climate change;
— pollution;
— violence towards animals;
— crime;
— political issues;
Contemporarily, public service announcements also include the issue of pandemic.
Literature review
The development of PSA in Kazakhstan is quite a controversial issue. First, as A. Romanov notes, there is no common definition of this term in Post-Soviet countries, as “social advertising” is not as precise as “PSA” [4]. Despite this fact, Kazakhstani PSA exists. It can be seen on the billboards, on the Internet, within the scope of specific celebrations etc. It can be sponsored either by government or by third parties such as companies or charities. The underdeveloped character of Kazakhstani PSA is motivated by various factors, including limited scope of distribution, absence of interest from the society’s side, censorship, and the partial or total absence of funding. Although PSA is generally created on non-commercial basis, it still needs financial support to be transmitted properly [5].
In USA, PSA is distributed on the regular basis. Its relevance, history and effectiveness were analyzed by various researchers. For the present research, the studies of language of PSA are the most relevant. For instance, in 1974 Jerry R. Lynn wrote an article where he dwelled on the effect that persuasive appeals produced when used in public service advertising [6]. Here it is necessary to note that 1970s were the time when cognitive linguistics started its development as a separate field of science. Although Lynn’s research mainly concerned the rhetorical techniques, it needs to be evaluated for its pioneering steps in investigating PSA as a definite phenomenon. However, most of the studies in this field concern the language of advertising in general: they do not focus on any particular types of advertisements. Such studies include the works of J. O. Sullivan, I. Piller, G. Cook, A. H. Kuppens, etc.
In 2013, Hai-bin Wu from the polytechnic college of China tried to apply the Appraisal model to public service advertising texts. Appraisal model is a system of language evaluation which belongs to the spheres of conceptual and sentiment analysis. This scholar attempted to investigate various samples of PSA written in English; some concepts were identified during the work, and the scheme which was built as a result resembled the regular nucleus-periphery model of a concept. On the other hand, the scholar was mainly counting the positive and negative sentiments found in the samples. As he noted, affect and appreciation are the driving forces of the creation of judgment [7].
Russian sources present an explicit research on this topic. For instance, S. Zemskov believes that PSA is a communicative resource of power; this view makes the study of PSA closer to the inquiries in the field of critical discourse analysis [8]. Several dissertations were written on the topic, including those by A. Solodovnikova, R. Krupnov, R. Ryumin, etc. Mostly, those works were the bridge between journalism and linguistics. They analyzed the rhetorical models utilized in PSA and connected them to the influence of this type of advertising on the consciousness and behavior.
Some of the concepts targeted by the researchers of PSA are family, fear, and harm. M. Terskikh handled a research which related to investigating the role and importance of the concept of family in contemporary public service announcements. In particular, he divides this wide concept into several terminals consisting of such slots as “nuclear family”, “motherhood”, “fatherhood”, “respect for the elderly”, and so on [9].
The concepts of PSA in social media were analyzed by E. Nemchinova [10].
Chkambayeva Z. A. conducted a research concerning the connection between public service advertising and the linguistic picture of the world of Kazakhstani people. She also provided some examples of successful and unsuccessful PSA regarding the effect, feedback, and evaluation from the side of viewers [11]. Still, we find this amount of research in the field of public service advertising insufficient. Especially, the linguistic side of such studies needs to be developed.
Methodology
For the present research, 11 public service advertising examples from Kazakhstan and English-speaking countries have been selected. Among them, there are two videos and 9 posters. The channels of distribution vary. The videos were mainly distributed via TV and internet, while posters can be seen both in virtual and paper variants. The issues discussed in these PSA include traffic control, climate change, pollution, violence towards animals, Internet addiction, and drug abuse. The examples were analyzed in conceptual way: the main linguistic concepts were identified, and the features of their influence were discussed.
Results and discussion
According to Rene Weber et al, one of the most widespread topics of English public service advertising is drug abuse [12]. Statistically, 20 million of US citizens reported having substance use disorders in 2018. The same year, 17 % of people with drug addiction had serious thoughts about suicide. As the statistics provided by American Addiction center shows, drug abuse is a considerable problem for minors, with 35 % of people aged 18–25 reporting the use of substances. Although PSA on this topic is widely provided, there is little evidence of its actual effectiveness.
Meanwhile, the situation in Kazakhstan is not quite different from that of US. Kazakhstan occupies 33 rd place among 93 countries by the deaths from drug overuse. There is little or no research about this situation, although heroine is one of the most popular substances to be found on the streets of Kazakhstan, as the annual statistical report of UN notes. These factors lead to creation and distribution of PSA on the billboards and on the Internet. At the same time, the effectiveness of this PSA is rarely discussed in scientific sphere. The articles mentioned above mainly address the general problems of PSA in Kazakhstan.
Another problem which is widely discussed in both English-language and Kazakhstani PSA is climate change. As to O. Golub, PSA tends to dwell on the most crucial situations happening in the society, and climate change is one of such situations [13]. Obviously, it attracts the attention of various groups of people, regardless of age, gender, and social class. Posters and billboards with PSA related to pollution, fumes, toxic discharges etc. can be seen both on the Internet and on the streets. Generally, such PSA is subsided from government’s side.
PSA on gender issues (especially public service advertising related to feminism and harassment) is widespread in America, Britain and other English-speaking countries. Kazakhstan also pays attention to this issue. For instance, in 2019 UN Women filmed a video on domestic abuse and gender inequality, calling for action and focusing the attention of the society on these problems. On the other hand, the effectiveness of this video was not subject to scientific research as well.
In general, PSA of US and Kazakhstan have a few similarities in terms of distribution (virtual and offline), topics (climate change, drug addiction, etc.) and channels of influence (visual and conceptual). Further research will show the appropriateness of these inferences.
The videos contained quite different concepts as they were about distinct topics. The first video, filmed in English, is entitled “Are you living an Insta lie?” Such a title is a calembour, the change of “Insta life”, a popular contemporary phrase which describes a person who spends a significant amount of time on social media apps. The plot of the video is as follows: several people share their lives on Instagram, following each other’s publications and giving likes to each other. However, none of their publications is real. The girl who shots a selfie with her boyfriend is having a conflict with him, the woman’s office table is not as perfectly neat as she wants it to be, and the man who marks his selfie with a hashtag “effortless” spends a lot of time trying to fix his photo. These examples are finished with a slogan: “Ditch the label. Your world, prejudice free”. The real meaning of the video is revealed when this slogan comes to the stage: this PSA is about the prejudices which people have about each other.
The following concepts were identified in this video: friendship, togetherness, social media, labels, prejudice, addiction, reality, falsification. The analysis of YouTube comments led to the assumption that “labels” was the most effective concept: over 60 % of commentators highlighted the use of this word. Also, the most popular comments were about reality, fake world, faking the smiles, and using social media to distract from “painful real environment”. One of the commentators compared Instagram use to “drug addiction” which may cause abstinence if quitted.
The example from Kazakhstan also touches quite a crucial subject: togetherness of the nations. In this video, two soldiers are fighting in World War II. One of them is Kazakh, and another is Russian. They hide in an abandoned house, surrounded by the enemies, and the Kazakh soldier tells his friend that he has a big family. In a few minutes, the enemies invade, and the Kazakh soldier dies, trying to protect his friend. Then the video shows the end of the war. The Russian soldier finds the family of his Kazakh friend and tells them about his savior. The video ends with the famous slogan: “One country. One nation. One destiny”.
The concepts identified in this video are as follows: family, friendship, heroism, sacrifice, salvation, togetherness. The video was published on YouTube, but there were no comments, which made it impossible to analyze its actual effectiveness with live samples. This PSA was also copied to Vkontakte, and there were 275 comments, around 65 % of them containing hate towards the creators of the video. The remaining commentators pointed out that the video was “strong” and “almost made them cry”. The emotional side of the PSA was highlighted, while the concepts mentioned above were not underlined. When it comes to negative comments, they were mainly written to certain people who liked or disliked the video. Again, the real effect of this PSA could not be analyzed through these samples, as they contained no useful information about how this video influenced the people. Here appears an assumption that social media is not a common channel of PSA distribution in Kazakhstan. The comments found there do not reflect the whole picture of PSA influence. However, some users pointed out that the above-mentioned video was “overly emotional” and thus failed to impress the viewers.
The problem of climate change was addressed in the recent poster which was published online. There, Google maps site was presented, and the slogan was as follows: “The search Almaty — garden city gave no results” (“По запросу Алматы — город-сад ничего не найдено”. This PSA operated with the concepts of greenness, nature, home, and changes; in general, it was perceived positively and marked as one of the best public service announcements created in the recent decades.
Another example of PSA is a poster which could be found in Almaty in 2012. The poster contained an image of a sheep crossing the street where the zebra is not provided. The bilingual slogan says: “People cross the road where it is allowed, sheep cross the road where they want” (“Люди переходят по правилам, бараны — где придется”). This slogan was evaluated as “powerful” and sometimes “hateful”: people liked it partially. Some viewers saw discrimination in this poster and claimed that this also happened in developed countries. However, the general influence of the poster was evaluated as positive. The concepts identified in this example are rudeness and politeness, citizenship, rules, breaking the rules. The PSA mainly relies on highly negative connotation of the word “sheep” in Russian language, as in Kazakh this word was substituted with quite general notion meaning livestock.
One example of PSA from an English-speaking country is a poster with two jaguars on it: a mother and a child. They are walking through the valley with labels “S” and “XL” attached to their spines. The slogan says: “Fashion claims more victims than you think”. This PSA was highly priced by the commentators of the site where it was published, though some of them still denied the presence of any danger for the jaguars. The concepts are as follows: victims, fashion, life, death, sacrifice. The general influence of this PSA can be evaluated as positive. However, it can be also noted that this example of public service advertisement did not get enough attention from the English-speaking community.
In 2020 Kazakhstan started a campaign against bullying in schools. As Astana Times notes, every fifth teen in Kazakhstan has been bullied at least once a month (or has been a bully himself or herself) [14]. These statistics led to creation of this program, aimed at making people aware of what is happening inside of the schools. Using the hashtag #bullyingispainful, anyone can share their stories on social media. The creator and developer of this program, “Aynalayin” public organization, believes that it will help the pupils overcome their problems.
This campaign has become quite powerful during distance education period, when schoolchildren had to attend online classes. It made them even more vulnerable to the bullying, say the official representatives of the program. As a result, the number of videos increased. TikTok, a popular social media app, contains up to twenty videos with this hashtag with 31,000 views in general. The original video, published by Peremena Media, received over 6000 likes and 371 comments, most of them being highly positive about the future outcomes of this campaign. The rest of the commentators, however, divided into two parts. Some of them believed that this campaign would have no practical result. Others noted they had never been bullied “and never will be”, thus eliminating the creators’ attempt to attract attention to this problem. Overall, the scope of positive comments was wider than that of negative comments. This campaign can be said to receive mainly positive feedback from social media users. However, its real effect cannot be tested due to the absence of
data in this field. The concepts identified in this campaign are as follows: bullying, help, urge, safety, comfort and discomfort, children rights, discrimination, aggression, protection. All the concepts were mentioned in the comments, so the conceptual influence of the posters is quite successful.
The following table shows the peculiarities of the remaining English-language public service advertising examples.
Table 1
English-language PSA: concepts
|
Slogan |
Illustration |
Concepts |
|
“Don’t take the joy out of city” |
An abandoned entertainment park with tons of rubbish lying all around |
Pollution, citizenship, joy, childhood |
|
“Stop global warming” |
The Statue of Liberty and the famous pyramids |
Citizenship, humanity, global warming, Earth, safety, home, protection, civilization |
|
“Do you know what you eat?” |
Vegetables in the form of scorpions and other insects, implying that the genes of those insects were used when breeding the vegetables |
Food, inevitable changes |
|
“Thousands of people owe their lives to organ donors” |
A woman hugging a ghost-like figure in the hospital corridor |
Togetherness, humanity, soul, friendship, sacrifice |
|
“Don’t drink and drive” |
An instrument for opening wine bottles which sits in a wheelchair |
Safety, life and death, consequences, boundaries, rules, citizenship |
These examples illustrate the main concepts which are crucial for English-language public service advertising. As it can be seen from the right column, one of the most widespread concepts is citizenship which includes patriotism, serving to the country, and having certain political interests. The analyzed examples of Kazakhstani public service announcements also had this concept. The area of climate change was also widely addressed in both English and Kazakhstani PSA. In general, most of the concepts appear to coincide. However, there are some slight differences in representation and distribution of the PSA.
For instance, Kazakhstan tends to transmit the PSA messages through TV or other government channels, while English-language PSA can be published anywhere. It can be noticed that Kazakhstani public service advertising does not receive the same number of responses as English-language PSA does when it is published online. As it has been mentioned above, the two videos were completely unequal in terms of responses. “Are you living an Insta lie?” received 16 million views and 13,046 comments, while the YouTube version of Kazakhstani PSA on national togetherness received almost no feedback. When it was published on Vkontakte, however, 375 people responded, and approximately half of the comments were positive. This leads to an assumption that the sphere of online distribution of PSA in Kazakhstan is underdeveloped.
When it comes to the conceptual influence of PSA, both English-language and Kazakhstani samples ended up being quite successful. The concepts were not difficult to identify, and they produced the expected effect on the viewers.
Conclusion
In the present research, the features of English-language and Kazakhstani public service advertising were analyzed in a contrastive way. For this purpose, the method of conceptual analysis was utilized. The verbalized and non-verbalized concepts of the PSA were identified, and their influence on the viewers was investigated. Each PSA consisted of several concepts, some of which were widely and explicitly presented in the slogans, and some were implicitly given by the sceneries, illustrations, and dialogues. Both explicit and implicit concepts had certain effect on the viewers. By “explicit concept” we refer to the verbalized linguistic constructions which can be found in the slogans or in the dialogues: their presence is justified and obvious. By “implicit concept” we refer to the unverbalized or verbalized notions met in the dialogues, illustrations, videos etc. Their presence is inferred and guessed by those who reply and give feedback to the mentioned PSA. An example of PSA was considered successful if almost all the concepts were identified by the viewers of this public service announcement. The negative or positive replies consisting of single words were not considered sufficient for the analysis.
Among the analyzed concepts, citizenship and climate change were the most popular for both countries. Apart from these, the concepts of togetherness, friendship, and humanism were discussed widely. Thus, the main differences between Kazakhstani and English-language PSA lie in the channels of distribution. While English-language public service advertisement receives most of its feedback online, Kazakhstan is still developing this sphere. The sentiment analysis of the comments showed that, however, the feedback is quite similar in both cases: positive responses outbalance the negative ones. Even if a PSA is criticized, it produces certain effect on the viewers. Other distinctive features include the cultural differences in conceptual content of PSA, which prescribes further analysis of this field.
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