Precedent Texts as a Means of Increasing the Efficiency of Social Advertising

Abstract

The article questions the efficiency of modern social advertising posters. The research aims to establish the reasons for the inefficiency of using precedent texts in social advertising and formulate the requirements that should be followed when using them. The material of the study was a collection of posters used in Russia for social advertising, selected by continuous sampling method from various media banks on the Internet, total of more than 14,000 items. The authors analyzed social advertising posters, of which contain various precedent texts (including the transformed ones). A psycholinguistic experiment was conducted to determine the degree of precedent text recognition in social advertising by recipients. It is shown that most of the precedent texts in social advertising do not meet the requirements for this type of advertising tools: they are not well-recognized; they are often not semantically related to the thesis being promoted; and represented in transformed and parcelled forms, which makes it difficult to identify them. The authors come to the conclusion that in order to increase the impact potential of social advertising with the help of precedent texts, it is necessary to take into account not only the very fact of using the precedent text, but also its place in the national culture. Moreover, constant updating of set expressions in the precedent text bank, addressee's cultural, historical and life experience are to be taken into consideration. It has been revealed that the most efficient source of precedent texts for social advertising posters are the works of art (both verbal and visual), since they allow especially high quality and complete reflection of fragments of reality in figurative form.