Opportunity or Togetherness?: Reception Analysis for Advertisements Publised in COVID-19 Process – Turkcell Case

Introduction

From the moment the mass media entered our lives, it has been discussed how they affect our behavior and even our attitudes. These studies, which were initially sociologically based, later gave way to communication researches. While theories that the audience was passive were developed in mainstream media studies in the 1930s and 1940s, in the studies conducted in the following period it is seen that theories regarding the recipients’ beginning to interpret the messages and discuss their meanings have been developed (Yaylagül, 2013: 46). It is seen that audience-oriented research in mass media began to be conducted after 1970s. What stands out in these researches is the ability to make sense of a message with expansions such as linguistics, semiotics, coding, decoding, reading. In these studies conducted after the 1970s, it is tried to explain how the audience reads and interprets a message. Here, it is revealed that the audience is not passive here and interprets the messages conveyed according to them (Tekinalp and Uzun, 2013: 120). Gürsoy Atar said that “it can be known what the audience watches, but there is no definite information on the television viewing practice of the audience and their interpretation of the messages they receive. The important point here is the television watching process of the audience” (Gürsoy Atar, 2017: 357).

Among Cultural Studies, Stuart Hall’s “Encoding / Decoding” study is important. According to Hall, the audience is both the receiver and the source of the message, because production schemes –coding stage- corresponds to the images and professional codes of the television institution (Mattelart and Mattelart, 1998: 88). Morley and Brunsdon (2005: 129) explain the foundations of this approach as follows:

• “1) The production of a meaningful message in the TV discourse is always problematic ‘work’. The same event can be encoded in more than one way. The study here is, then, of how and why certain production practices and structures tend to produce certain messages, which embody their meanings in certain recurring forms.

  • 2)

    The message in social communication is always complex in structure and form. It always contains more than one potential ‘reading’. Messages propose and prefer certain readings over others, but they can never become wholly closed around one reading. They remain polysemic.

  • 3)

    The activity of ‘getting meaning’ from the message is also a problematic practice, however transparent and ‘natural’ it.”

Hall’s analysis defines three types of explanation for the audience: dominant, opponent, and argumentative. The first is in line with hegemonic perspectives that seem to be the understanding of a natural, legitimate, inevitable social order and a professional universe. The second interprets the message according to a worldview that opposes another framework of relativity (eg, by turning the national interest into the class interest). The argumentative code, on the other hand, is a mixture of opposing logics, a mixture of opposition and harmony elements that partially adopt dominant meanings and values, but derive from a situation, for example, the group to which they belong (Mattelart and Mattelart, 1998: 88). “The context in which the audience turn on their television or take over a magazine — the social use of the media — limits their interpretation” (van Zoonen, 2014: 388).