The Narrating Instances in Advertising Stories
The Narrating Instances in Advertising Stories

Summary/Abstract: Most of the commercials we watch on a daily basis are created by developing specific narrative strategies, and inside them we can easily identify the stable structure of advertising communication. This is why, in this case, narrative instances describe the relationship between the storyteller, customer and the main character. When we analyze the literary texts, these coordinates offer a classic connection including other instances such as: author, narrator, character and reader. The difference consists in adapting the literary instances to the main goal of the ad, whose main outcome should be to persuade the customers and sell them products. Therefore, the customer becomes the reader, i.e. the message receiver, fact that assumes his integration into the story, as a possible buyer. The purpose of this article is to prove that advertising stories follow a similar construction to those of the fictional texts, even if the main feature of this area is concision. Moreover, the narration develops in commercials creations on two levels: on the one hand, on the verbal level, and, on the other hand, the visual level. For this reason, the story is told with the help of a complementary character making the link between image and word. In most of the cases the roles (play parts) are split equally between both levels and the story is built through a double story-telling. In each case, the way of telling the story could be approached differently according to various television formats such as: testimonial, demonstration, slice of life, animation. Regarding the narrator, the commercials formats imply a specific pattern depending on the story and the characters’ involvement. The narration has a single purpose: to sell the product getting over its features repeatedly, but coming closer to the customer who enjoys to listen to stories and identifying with its heroes. Even if a commercial shows only for a couple of seconds, the story is focused on the narrative instances and runs everything more dynamically and by using interesting narrative strategies such as: retrospection, introspection, plot fragmentation, embedding techniques or parallel plans of the narration. Who tells the story and to whom it is told are the coordinates of every ad which relies on the product genesis and use, whose images are supposed to be credible.

• Details
• Contents