DRAMATIC TRANSACTIONS IN THE DISCOURSE OF ADVERTISING

My paper deals with dramatic transactions (as identified in advertisements), with a special focus on the roles of the Persecutor, the Victim and the Saviour, in different ego states (Parent, Adult and Child). These are present in many circumstances in people’s everyday life and are also used by ad makers in order to influence and seduce the receiver. We use a multidisciplinary methodological approach which combines various fields, such as communication, psychology, psychotherapy, semiotics, rhetoric, transactional analysis and linguistics. We intend to define each of the three statuses, their roles and the mechanisms that govern their dynamics in the discourse of advertising. These are part of a game that triggers the attention and the desire of the receiver towards a certain product or service, which ‘is meant’ to improve his life. In order to determine the most important dramatic transactions in the advertising messages, we will investigate a few printed commercials from the interwar period, published in the Romanian weekly magazine Realitatea Ilustrată (The Illustrated Reality).