Everyday Creativity and Communication Workshop

The full-day workshop was managed by Professor Jeannette Littlemore and Dr Paula Perez-Sobrino as part of their Marie Curie project, Exploring Multimodal Metaphor in Advertising,  and brought together academics and business people interested in language in advertising.  Being particularly fascinated by this area of research, I signed up to attend the workshop.  

​There was a host of insight into this applied area of linguistics that was especially intriguing; from learning about the impact of logo design to watching psychophysiological technology that tracked skin (sweat) responses of participants to audio-visual viral advertising! 

Click on the title picture to go to the event's website for more details.

There were three main highlights for me.
1. Paula Perez-Sobrino talked about the symbolic power and meaning consumers can elicit from brand logos.  
I discovered that even the types of font (including the size, shape, and colour) can have quite an impact on how we react, feel, and behave towards these advertising logos, their brands, and advertising resources in general.  There is a close link between the types of font and it being symbolic of certain attributes of a product.  For example, the comic sans font that I am sure many of us have used before is round and plump in its appearance on the page, can associate with comfort and friendliness.  Furthermore, the shape of the logo itself, being in a box or circle, can symbolise containment and, in advertising when the intended message to consumers is most likely to be a positive one, security and protection.  This comes in particularly useful for car manufacturers - how many of them have circular logos?!  I had no idea. 

2. David Houghton, working in collaboration with Paula Perez-Sobrino and Jeannette Littlemore, demonstrated with psychophysiological technology how figurative operations can elicit instantaneous and physical responses from consumers when presented with audio-visual advertising that has gone viral.  In the session, members of the audience were 'plugged in' to the skin (sweat) detector and shown viral video advertisements containing metaphor, metonymy, irony, and hyperbole.  It was fascinating watch the physical reaction spike on the graph while Taylor Swift sang along to the tunes her new Apple iPhone was playing during her workout on a treadmill, for one example.  

Can you see the spikes of perspiration the participant is experiencing while watching viral video advertisements containing figurative operations: metaphor, metonymy, irony, and hyperbole?

3. Finally, perhaps the most useful part of the workshop was having the ability to network with the business people in addition to the academics, and discussing the importance of applied linguistics through a marketing lense.

And not to mention that the event was free!  More people need to look out for these workshops - in particular, members of the the marketing and advertising industry.  We need to bridge the gap between business industries and academic research to put to full use the information that is crucially being discovered everyday in our communication!  

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Copyright © Samantha Ford 2017-2018