Paper short abstract:

In this paper, we bring social advertising to the forefront of the collective fight against sociocultural vulnerability by considering it not only a crucial tool for raising public awareness, but also as a potential major transformative social agent itself.

Paper long abstract:

The tremendous economic and financial crisis that befell Europe (with a major impact on Southern Countries as Spain) a decade ago has gradually pushed vulnerable groups over the verge of poverty. The combination of depriving factors as the increase in the number of households in a situation (or at risk) of poverty, the loss of jobs and the decrease in material income in many households have paired with the inability of institutional care services and public resources to alleviate the living condition of those exposed to situations of moderate and severe risk of vulnerability.

In this context, the conjunction of a weakened welfare state, on one hand, and the overload of personal networks of informal support, on the other, triggered various public and private initiatives mainly aimed at raising awareness of different manifestations of the problem, as well as at raising funds for specific palliative initiatives. The design of advertising campaigns that use Media as the main communicative artery has become a crucial asset to reach this goal. Hence, in our paper we propose to analyse the communicative and persuasive strategies that set up these campaigns, specifically concerning poverty and vulnerability situations, by paying special attention to the underlying ideological assumptions and to the ways of representing vulnerable subjects. And to do so, we propose a multimodal analytical strategy (that is: including several agents' perspectives) that, far from being limited to the mere examination of the audio-visual repertoire, seeks for the incorporation of media and professionals from the advertising milieu.