Discursul publicitar ieri şi azi. O analiză comparativă a mesajului publicitar din presă, înainte şi după 1989
The Advertising Discourse. Past and Present. A Comparative Approach of the Advertising Message in Romanian Periodicals before and after 1989

Summary/Abstract: In order to reach its purpose, any form of advertising must create a connection between the consumer and the product. The most efficient way of reaching the potential consumer is by appealing to his/ her system of values and emotions. Consequently, advertising relies for its success on culture, values and traditions. For this reason, advertising can be, at the same time, an useful tool for observing the pragmatic implication of language, because, especially in advertisements, the manner of transmitting and deciphering the message it is vital. From this comes the central hypothesis of this paper: advertising can become an instrument of diagnostic for the social and economical realities of a certain time frame, because it exploits this very cultural dimension in order to anchor itself in reality and it constantly orientates its rhetorical means towards the individual. The study sets out to identify key points in the evolution of the advertising discourse, through a comparative analyses structured on three levels. The first level analyzes adverstisments topics, the second level analyzes how the fluctuations in the communist ideology have been reflected in the advertising discourse, and finally the third level analyzes the changes that took place in the advertising discourse, brought by the fall of the old regime and the transition to a free market. For this comparison, I will use, in a starting phase, the print advertisements from România liber㬠and Scânteia, during two different periods of the totalitarian regime: the year 1968, that marks the peak of a relaxation period, from and economical and ideological standpoint, and the year 1986, significant for a period of political and economic seclusion. Moreover, I will investigate the manner in which the advertising discourse reflected in the two periodicals (after 1990, Scânteia takes the name Adevărul) has adapted to the transition’s challenges. By comparising 1990’s prints to those from 1995 we will be able to identify different moments in the evolution of the adversting discourse. Another dimension of the comparative analysis targets the differences in vision between the two periodicals under the communist regime, with obvious shades of totalitarian politics. The comparison is structured on thematic dimensions (commercial, social, sports and cultural advertising), that can be identified in the two periodicals in the targeted time frames. Changes in the advertising speech are more present than ever, due to a shift toward pronounced emotional connotation from the old mannered, rational, objective and informative advertising message. Therefore, present day ads and commercials have a smaller volume of text and, in contrast with the old ones, they exploit more the visual dimension. Starting from a historical approach, the purpose of this study is to identify the potential mechanisms and formulas of adaptation that the advertising discourse uses to adjust to the social and economical realities and mark

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