Advertising discourse as form of social practice includes power reproduction and abuse at the micro and macro level. The attitudes and ideologies are not only mediated trough mental models and manifested in the discourse but that discourse contributes to their formation and modeling. Sexism and ageism as discriminatory practices are present in the concept of magazine advertising ads. They are incorporated on the advertising scene where the advertiser addresses to potential product users citing the "scientific truth" and using the strategies of power and manipulation to convince them. The aim of this paper was to examine how magazine advertising ads for the anti-age products as speech acts of promise reflect and create sexism and ageism and thereby indicate the extreme intolerance against aging women. The corpus consists of 33 anti-age ads from women`s magazine distributed in Serbia. I use in my analysis sociocognitive approach of CDA (van Dijk). The unit of analysis is speech act embodied in the dominated narrative. The results show that anti-age advertising ads are structured as indirect speech acts of promise, recommendation and convincement. The advertiser`s attention of selling product is directed to aging women as the target group. The illocutionary effect portrays that the beauty and attractiveness are in all naivety desirable and easily accessible what leads to negative perception of aging women.
Key words: advertising discourse, ageism, anti-age ads, sexism, speech act
Bašaragin, Margareta (2014). „Sexism in Anti-Age Magazine Advertising Ads – What Do They Promise?”, In: Valić Nedeljković, Dubravka, Pralica, Dejan (eds.) (2014). Digital media technologies and socio-educational changes IV. Novi Sad: Department of Media Studies; Faculty of Philosophy, 28-37.
Ph. D. Margareta Bašaragin