Environmental issues in unconventional social advertising: A semiotic perspective.

Even though semiotic analysis of media texts has always viewed advertising as an exemplary object of investigation, only a limited number of research studies has concentrated on unconventional social campaigns. As we will try to demonstrate through the analysis of some international environment oriented case studies, social advertising is not merely a sub genre of advertising language, and the effectiveness of communication strategies used by social campaigns in fact depends upon a sort of “semiotic autonomy.” Using a textual semiotic approach, we will focus on some of the most frequently recurring unconventional strategies in environment awareness campaigns, with the aim of exploring the issue of social advertising effectiveness in depth.