Man's Last Stand! Dialogue and Polysemy in Advertising Reception

This paper examines a case of polysemic advertising reception on YouTube and shows how users negotiate and challenge ad meaning in dialogue with other users, texts, and the persuasive intend build into the ad. Through a combined netnography and discourse analysis, the commercials, user comments and video responses are analyzed. The analysis shows how polysemy is an aspect of the reading process itself and not an outcome of a more or less loyal acceptance of ad meaning. Thus, this study gives evidence to rhetorically oriented advertising reception theories.