Advertising Events: Content and Semiotic Analyses of Cannes Film Festival Posters

Abstract

The visual, textual, and symbolic elements used in printed advertising can help target markets in that these appeal to their expectations and needs. This research investigates the historical evolution of printed advertising, namely posters, for the Cannes Film Festival. It aims to understand how the design and content of these posters have altered over time and what contextual and symbolic meanings could be derived from their analysis. To this end, the document archive of the Cannes Film Festival, one of the major international film festivals of Europe, was accessed and posters used between 1946 and 2016 were analyzed through a reliance on content and semiotic analyses. The findings of these analyses offer insight into how marketing strategies and efforts of organizers have changed over time, from the early days of the "establishment" to the current "prominent" status of the festival as one of the leading arts festivals in Europe. The findings also reveal that the festival has been emphasizing the visual more than the textual elements in its posters with the branding efforts progressively shifting towards the nearly exclusive reliance on visual elements over time, especially since the year 2000 onwards. Interestingly, over time the posters have also become art pieces in their own right through contribution of visuals by various artists.