DGT’s emotional hard line: textual analysis of the audiovisual campaign "Vivo o Muerto" (2018)

Abstract

Abstract: The DGT's prevention campaigns consolidate a type of persuasive institutional advertising that has undergone major transformations throughout its 60 years of existence. The current Dirección General de Tráfico (DGT) advertising claims the use of the so-called "hard line" with special emphasis on the emotional aspect, which has been the subject of considerable controversy. The Road Safety Strategy 2011-2020 (DGT, 2011) is the one that during the last decade has marked the basis of the entity's communication, being its audiovisual campaigns the most striking ones. This paper aims to clarify the functioning of this "emotional hard line" and its psychological appreciation to the detriment of the scopic impact that had been characterizing the previous hard line. Using the methodology of textual analysis on spanish campaign Vivo o muerto (Alive or dead) (DGT, 2018), the existence of a "emotional hard line" variant is investigated thanks to a discursive development in two dimensions (narrative and rhetorical). Then, we discuss how the new variant of the "hard line" - the emotional one - is imposed in the campaign, thus departing from the visual «hard line» previously experimented by the DGT, an institution that seems to have taken note of the objections raised by specialists in the past. Finally, we concluded that the Vivo o muerto campaign proposes a reorientation of the "hard line" without the need to make abusive use of bloody advertising.