Targeting Women's Healthism through DTCA: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of CaC-1000 PLUS Tablet Advertisement

Abstract

The present study is the investigation of CaC-1000 PLUS Tablet Advertisement using the multimodal lens. The aim of the research is to investigate how direct-to-consumer advertisement serves the purpose of promoting explicit ideology, which is healthism, and implicit ideology, which is sales and brand enhancement. For this purpose, Kress and van Leuween's Metafunctional Theory of Visual Grammar (2006), divided into three main functions: representational, interactional, and compositional, is applied to the selected part of the video. The findings revealed that the CaC tablet advertisement represents a female actress as a represented participant to show unity with the targeted female audience. At the representation stage, apart from female representation, different processes, circumstances, classification, analytical, and symbolic features are consciously designed to stress the use of Cac-1000 plus. This conscious attempt is visible in the represented participant's gestures, words, setting, and structural arrangements. Persuasion for using calcium supplements is also reinforced through different interactional features. The main represented participant (Kubra Khan) maintains close personal distance and demands gaze from the viewers through frontal and eye level angles in interaction to compel the viewers to pay heed to the message of healthism. The highest modality is utilized to make the advertisement look naturalistic. The advertisement's composition focused on using CaC tablets as the right solution to escape pain and Osteoporosis and making the women believe that they are "stepping up." In sum, this article tries to show how ideologies can be traced from advertisements through multimodal critical discourse analysis.