Talking the nation over advertising: The case of Catalan commercial advertisements

Abstract

This article addresses how advertisements are narrative devices for the construction, imagination and diffusion of the nation’s depictions in the context of globalization. In this analytical sense, we suggest the current traits in advertising: the hyper-symbolization of the brand and the extrapolation of nation branding to product advertising. We study different representations of Catalonia through a sample of the audio-visual commercial advertising on food and drinks on public television in Catalonia between 2009 and 2017. These examples show the main symbolic frameworks of the nation and re-created identity through two types of depictions of Catalan tradition and experiential Catalanness, that which can exemplify the idea of banal nationalism in the sense of Billig and Edensor’s everyday nationalism. The main objective of our proposal is to understand commercial advertisements as forms of national discourse in everyday nationalism and how the private sector uses this.