Conducting Multimodal Rhetorical Analysis of TV Ads with Atlas.ti 7

Abstract This paper lays out the steps involved in the process of analyzing the rhetorical structure of TV ads with the employment of the content analytic software Atlas.ti 7. By drawing on a corpus of 87 TV commercials from brands that make up the world’s most valuable brands according to WPP’s BrandZ 2012 report and a resulting pool of 561 ad filmic segments, it will be shown (i) how TV ads may be segmented, (ii) how individual segments may be coded with one or more verbo-visual rhetorical figures in the light of three distinctive levels of analysis (on an intra-segment level, between two succeeding segments, against the background of an ad film’s “global semantic structure”) and (iii) how statistical output pertaining to the rhetorical structure of TV ads may be produced. This technically oriented analysis, which is part of ongoing research in the field of multimodal advertising rhetoric (cf. Rossolatos 2013a, 2013b, 2013c), is intended to contribute to scholarly research about the benefits that stem from combining an interpretive approach to the analysis of ads’ rhetorical configuration that is edified on film semiotics, with a quantitative approach, enabled by the employment of the content analytic software Atlas.ti 7.

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