É proibido fumar, mas não é proibido beber: uma análise comparativa das publicidades de cigarro e cerveja

Abstract

This work presents some results of analyses that were based on the theoretical and methodological approach of Greimas Semiotics. The corpus studied was composed of advertisements of cigarettes and beer, published in Brazil in the years 1960 and nowadays. Our main objective was to compare these ads in order to verify the ideological profile of society in these two different moments, considering their values, concepts and prejudices. For such analyses, we focused the discourse level of the generative path of meaning, mainly the categories of themes and figures from the semantical component. Besides, we also studied aspects of the expression plan of the non verbal text (the image), such as the chromatic and the topological dimensions, since ads are syncretical texts. The results show that while the stimulus for beer consumption is, each day, more creative and persuasive, with the usage of the female figure as an object of desire, the cigarette ads exhibited nowadays, on the other hand, put the emphasis on negative themes, such as disease, death and process of aging, showing how much this kind of advertisement changed, mainly when we compare them to the ads from the nineteen-sixties that relate cigarette consumption to themes like happiness, elegance and health.