A visual analysis of festive television commercials in Malaysia

Lean Mei Li

doi:10.1515/mult.2011.014

Article

A visual analysis of festive television commercials in Malaysia

Lean Mei Li

Published/Copyright: August 25, 2011

Published by

Become an author with De Gruyter Brill

Submit Manuscript Author Information Explore this Subject

From the journal Volume 30 Issue 3-4

Abstract

Malaysia is a multiracial country with a diverse range of religions, leading to a broad range of religious festivals throughout the year. In recent years, corporate giants such as Petronas, Telekom Malaysia (TM), Tenaga and Astro have taken to airing television commercials (TVCs) that contain a local touch when greeting their customers. Perhaps the TVCs that have noticeably touched the hearts of most Malaysians are those sponsored by Petronas. Petronas used to commission the late Yasmin Ahmad to produce these TVCs. Thus, this paper is a visual analysis of the Petronas advertisements for one of the main religious festivals celebrated in Malaysia: Hari Raya Aidilfitri. The corpus selected for analysis is those TVCs directed by Yasmin Ahmad for Petronas between the years 1995 and 2008. The theoretical framework for the analysis of these social-commentary type commercials is the one proposed by Theo van Leeuwen.

Keywords:: visual analysis; commercials; Yasmin Ahmad; religious festivals

Address for correspondence: Section for Co-curricular Courses, External Faculty Electives and TITAS (SKET), University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Published Online: 2011-08-25

Published in Print: 2011-August

You are currently not able to access this content.

Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/mult.2011.014

Keywords for this article

visual analysis; commercials; Yasmin Ahmad; religious festivals