‘Keep calm, stay safe, and drink bubble tea’: Commodifying the crisis of Covid-19 in Singapore advertising

Abstract

Abstract Advertisements employ multimodal configurations of semiotic resources in an effort to lead consumers to draw particular meanings from desired consumption behaviors. This analysis examines the deployment of such resources in advertising during the global Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on the Southeast Asian nation of Singapore. We identify five discourses that offer distinct framings of Covid-19 as a challenge for workers, a wellness issue, a threat to home and family, a challenge for women, and a threat to the Singapore lifestyle. Undergirded by neoliberal notions such as the productivity imperative, these discourses rationalize a range of consumer behaviors as necessary and justified in the struggle to defeat the virus. Advertisements are argued to place the burden of navigating the pandemic primarily on women via the evocation of power femininity. We propose a new framework, crisis commodification, as a means of understanding the ideological mechanisms at play in Covid-19 advertising. (Critical discourse analysis, crisis commodification, semiotic analysis, advertising, public health, Southeast Asia)*