Abstract

SANTOS, Cristina. The 21 Characteristics of Advertising Communication in the 21st Century: The Supremacy of Virtuality and Visuality. Vista [online]. 2023, n.12, e023013.  Epub Jan 30, 2024. ISSN 2184-1284.  https://doi.org/10.21814/vista.5202.

As technology has evolved, online communication has become an integral part of the daily lives of brands and consumers, a preponderance that increased dramatically with the pandemic. This is the case even in Portugal, despite it showing more analogue data consumption compared to the European average. Nowadays, it is difficult to outline a strategy without including the virtual dimension, given how inevitable the digitisation of messages is. The market has changed and internet users have gained unprecedented prominence as active, independent and empowered content producers. The paradigm has shifted with the emergence of the prosumer, who has moved away from a merely receptive, passive and contemplative role. Consequently, with the loss of the communicational monopoly of brands, the exchange of opinions between virtual communities, made up of peers, has come to the fore, with trust passing from the brands, through traditional advertising, to individuals themselves. There are circuits containing voluntary and informal information sharing, in which personalised experiences abound, to become an outstanding, credible and organic source of influence.

On the other hand, we find ourselves in a mostly visual society, with the importance of this galvanised by the emergence of social media, which are full of aesthetic stimuli. Content involving images is prioritised, through iconographic argumentation, to the detriment of verbal rhetoric, particularly in advertising. This prevalence of image is due to its greater emotional, symbolic, recreational and motivational potential, which ends up having a greater ability to influence consumption processes. Therefore, audiovisual practices, particularly video, stand out because they make it easier to see and share a message. There are indeed many changes which form part of a volatile era, and it is necessary to be aware of them. To this end, this article contains a holistic contemporary literature review, that has enabled the identification of the 21 main characteristics of advertising communication in use in the 21st century, in which virtuality and visuality stand out.

Keywords : advertising; virtuality; visuality; contemporaneity.

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