What the Advertising Message should be Like

According to Jakobson’s model, the advertising message has to attract attention (phatic function), persuade (conative function), rely on reason (referential function) or emotions (emotive function), and get people to act (conative and referential functions). Jakobson’s (1956) multilingual function is not considered for the purposes of this study.

• Referential function: the message conveyed by the advert is clear: it makes explicit reference to the “red taste of life” , including the most exciting aspects of life, among them, good wine.
• Emotive function: the advert, with both verbal message and pictures, plays on the commonest feelings and emotions of each human being, like love, passion and general wellbeing.
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  The audiovisual message presents all these feelings and emotions within a dreamlike atmosphere, set in a thick forest which refers clearly to the wine’s Italian name Selvarossa.

• Phatic function: people’s attention is firstly attracted by the choice of particular audio-visual effects that isolate the red color only. The contact with customers is also established by a second-person message, which is directly addressed to its audience that feels immediately involved in what the advert promotes. In this way, people become more and more interested in what the advert/commercial advertises and are encouraged to buy.
• Conative function: the advertisement’s verbal and visual messages, as said before, persuade people to buy. This function is fully accomplished by the use of the imperative in the verbal message, which pushes people to feel again or discover this series of emotions triggered by a glass of good wine.
• Poetic function: this function is achieved by some peculiar choices related tokey-words and idioms. The message’s key-word is red, referring to strong feelings and sensations, to our red wine and, why not, to the Tre Bicchieri award, whose logo is red as well. The first part of the message, don’t bottle up your emotions is an English idiom, which contains the word bottle, always linked to the wine context, but having a different meaning as a phrasal verb correlated to feelings, emotions and sensations.

For this purpose, it seems appropriate to mention an interesting study carried out by the American linguists Lakoff and Johnson related to the metaphors of everyday life. The human body is listed below the container metaphors: “Bounded objects, whether human beings, rocks, or land areas, have sizes. This allows them to be quantified in terms of the amount of substance they contain.”

This means that the idiomatic expression doesn’t bottle up your emotions could come from this culturally specific perspective, conceiving the human being as a container of feelings. This view seems to be confirmed by the fact that “various kinds of states may also be conceptualized as containers,” that is, the same feelings and states like love (He is in love), euphoria (he entered a state of euphoria), depression (he fell into depression), passion (his eyes were burning with a passion) are also conceptualized as containers of basic instincts that relate to the image of a liquid contained in a bottle.

These final remarks contribute to the definition of a wide series of interesting correspondences between red wine and ordinary people, being both actual “containers” of something special, extraordinary, and unexpected.

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