The Language of Beer Advertisements

Seminar paper from the year 1999 in the subject Didactics - English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 2,0 (B), University of Hamburg (FB English - Didactics), course: Seminar II: The Language of Poetry and Advertising, language: English, abstract: While the last centuries of human history can be characterised as a time when most countries were only concerned with increasing their power and either occupying other countries or separating themselves from them, our century (and especially the last decade ) is the age of unification and political collaboration: Europe is uniting and the so-called 'global- market' persistently developing. To the industries this new market is important in two respects: On the one hand there is an increasing number of potential customers. On the other hand the competition between industries and their products is getting tougher. Accordingly the development implies both: chance and risk. In order to seize the chance (= sell more products) and to avoid the risk of being swallowed by other industries it is most important to the companies to promote their products or services and to make them become commonly known. The best possibility to do so is to advertise them and it is quite interesting to examine the way how this is done. In this term paper I am going to concentrate on one single example of this process: beer ads. I have chosen this topic firstly because the beer- market is a perfect example of what is going on in general, as there are hundreds and thousands of different beer companies trying to sell their products, and secondly because even though there are that many different brands most ads show certain similarities. I am going to focus on these similarities much more than on the differences - as examining the respects in which beer ads differ is a much more complex topic which would go beyond the scope of this term paper. Hence, it is the aim of the following analysis to point out general ideas and concepts of beer ads concerning both components: images and language. In order to do so I am first of all going to explain the importance language possesses in ads as this question has been discussed quite controversially during the last years. The topic of the second part is the particular language used in beer ads (considering three examples) and the ideas which are connected to it. The third part presents the images used in these ads by not only describing the pictures but rather by pointing out the overall effect which they create. This effect is not only achieved by the combination of language and images but moreover by a complex interplay between both of them.