LEARNING TO TALK BACK CRITICALLY TO CONTROVERSIAL ADVERTISEMENTS IN AN EDUCATIONAL SETTING

Social media is well known to allow interactive communication between people and to offer an opportunity to transfer content, improving reach, frequency, permanence and immediacy. It has become an amplifier of ideas, a creator of meaning. In an era characterized by the fight of global moral and ethical values, social media has shown the potential to initiate and sustain a kind of narrative debate consequential to social life and to individual experience. Controversial advertisements (ads) constitute a paradigmatic example. When protests erupt by concerned bodies of society, either the advertisers drop them from being broadcast for a temporary period and/or move up to the court to fight for their reasons. However, the proliferation of new media keeps controversy alive. More recently, in despite of offering public apologies, advertisers themselves have taken the lead in nurturing the debate by enhancing their position through teasers or additional ads. In this broad scenario, there is not only one ad, as there are also additional products to be considered. While reactions to the controversial ad usually become manifest through popular backchannel chats, responsible critiques to the whole campaign require more advanced epistemological skills. In a pedagogical setting, the question arises of how to empower future advertisers to participate in a world of conflicting global values by talking back critically to controversies. We argue that learning to talk back to the alleged offense by means of video remixing (for example, by MediaBreaker) constitutes a fruitful pedagogical initiative.
In this paper we investigate how to grasp the argumentative structure of controversial ads that go viral in the Internet. Methodologically, our approach follows Stephen Toulmin’s model. [1] [2] Particularly, we ask how the structural components of an argument can help viewers to expose both, the intended meaning of the brand and the ad’s controversy. We also consider the reactions of a group of undergraduate students (from Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte/Brazil) to some controversial advertisements. The students’ contribution indicates that they correctly grasp the nature of the controversy and perceive the duality of the ‘intended meaning versus controversy’. It is also possible to infer that, although they express a certain degree of commitment to the alleged reasons for offense – mimicking viewers’ reaction in the social media – they do not formally offer warrants to their position. We suggest that further work is necessary to clarify whether this is just due to habituation to a repeatedly emotional narrative behavior typical of social media, or to a lack of competency in constructing sound arguments. This is an important point to clarify if our study is to be taken as prototypical for investigating the global war of narratives that society faces today and the role of social media in other spheres than advertising and marketing, where controversies may arise.