The Effectiveness of Persuasion: Analysis of the Covid-19 Vaccines TV Advertisement in Anglo-Saxon Countries and their Impact in Citizens’ Behaviour

Abstract

Covid-19 vaccination campaigns have been a trending issue all over the world, and investigations are needed for the analysis of the different factors which surround their setup and effectiveness. The research developed in this work shows the analysis of different television adverts concerning national Covid-19 vaccination campaigns, and their further effect on society. To do so, a corpus consisting of transcriptions of these adverts from Anglo-Saxon countries was compiled. The process of compilation was manual, selecting the transcriptions of different adverts which were later added to the corpus. Then, different epistemic modal and deictic elements present in the samples were analysed as indicators of linguistic persuasion strategies. Finally, the results were compared to the vaccination rates of each country to try to find a pattern of relationship. At the end, the results show a seemingly indirect relation between the use of the persuasive elements analysed and the amount of citizens vaccinated.

La importancia de las campañas de vacunación contra la Covid-19 son un asunto reciente considerado de importancia global por la mayoría de la sociedad. A raíz de ello, esta investigación busca indagar en la efectividad y la utilidad real de los mecanismos de persuasión lingüística en los datos de vacunación y el comportamiento de dicha sociedad respecto a estas campañas. A partir de un corpus lingüístico formado por anuncios televisivos gubernamentales parte de las campañas nacionales de vacunación contra la Covid, compilada manualmente de fuentes oficiales, se compararon los mecanismos de persuasión que utilizaban dichos gobiernos, concretamente, elementos de modalidad epistémica y deixis. Tras recabar esta información, se realizó una comparativa entre los datos de vacunación y el número de estrategias persuasivas utilizadas, para finalmente concluir que parece existir una correlación indirecta entre dichos datos de vacunación y las estrategias persuasivas que objeto de este estudio.