A multimodal analysis of advertising posts in celebrity profiles at Instagram

Abstract

Images exploitation in advertising for digital vehicles such as social media has been widely highlighted nowadays. Those material speak by themselves, considering that images communicate, convince, and engage internet users. They seduce and induce purchasing. Advertising, through images, takes advantage of habits, values, "‹"‹and cultures and transforming them into merchandise, in a context in which even the consumer (the Internet user) is also a product for sale. In this scenario, the research hereafter aimed at analyzing imagery texts from fashion and beauty advertising post on Instagram celebrity profiles, involving representational, interactive and compositional meanings of visual grammar. Thus, theoretical-methodological support was based on Grammar of Visual Design, by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006), as they also studied advertising, digital social media, Instagram and consumerism. The study has evidenced the great diversity of image modalizing resources of advertising posts in Brazilian celebrities"™ profiles, which are at the service of image manipulation to fulfill market strategies that consist of idealizing standards of beauty, imitating personalities and following the market of verticalized fashion, which widen social discrepancies based on the precepts of contemporary capitalism with a view of consumerism, as an ingrained evil with corrosive power. However, we have realized that, despite the images build a text independent of the written text, the visual language is still little explored by the "common" reader, in a way that they become more exposed to the inherently negative effects of advertising.