Inclusion of Nature in Online Green Advertisements of Gated Compounds and Its Impact on Social Justice

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine ways through which nature is incorporated in online green ads as a manipulative marketing tool to promote gated compounds in Egypt. Integrating images of pristine natural landscape in ads evokes positive emotions, which transfer to the advertised commodity or service. Furthermore, the interplay of images with texts of ecological aspects motivates particular ideologies towards the environment. The present study also aims at investigating the insinuated ideology in these naturebased ads through fostering a particular social identity, which could lead to social inequality. The texts accompanying online green ads of gated compounds in Egypt, which is an Arabic speaking country, appear in English although these ads target mainly Egyptian customers. Hence, these nature-based ads aim to address and engage the educated social class and those who would understand the content of the accompanying English texts, which include some sophisticated, complex lexis. On the other hand, others who are unable to comprehend this English content are marginalized or excluded, which reflects and emphasizes social injustice. Despite the great impact of incorporating images of nature and texts which carry environmental meanings in green advertisements, and despite the progressing role of ecoadvertising, few linguistic researches explore ways through which textual and visual elements are synthesized in green ads as a marketing tool. To that end, Machin and Mayr’s (2012) multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) model is adopted to explore the visual and textual elements in online green ads which propagate gated compounds in Egypt. Data is collected