1 Introduction
#IoRestoACasa
, #IStayAtHome
, #YoMeQuedoEnCasa
, #JesuisChezMoi
suddenly became the most popular hashtags in the 3 media (print, broadcast, and Internet), and brands adopted them in their advertising, along with assurances of continued availability of food and other goods to meet basic needs. These messages quickly became necessary after the wild hoarding of basic goods that characterised the initial phase of the pandemic, and companies immediately began to insure the continuous availability of supplies. For example, the Spanish insurance company Assist Card invited people to be “infected”—alluding to the meaning of the word—by those who did not fill their shopping carts, did not raise prices to speculate, from those who stayed at home. In the Italian edition of the commercial there were many images of balconies, those of the first days, with waving national flags and the Italian anthem in the background. In this context, Italy took a special place, being the first European country after China to be affected by the pandemic, and many “emotional” commercials were released, always emphasising gratitude to those who fought on the front lines against the pandemic, such as doctors and service personnel, and celebrating national sentiment.#ItaliaCheResiste
(#ItaliaFightingBack
). This commercial represented a perfect combination of a brand with a symbol of Italy that was able to show its strength when the commercial was distributed abroad and became the perfect synthesis of the brand philosophy for foreign markets.2 Background
2.1 Advertising and brand awareness
#IoRestoInGarage
(#Istayinthegarage
). The Mazda video clarifies the shift in customer approach in the very first sentence: “This is not really a commercial, but a message of hope”. With a still image, a musical tapestry, poppy words and an absolutely minimalist style, the idea is to convey to customers that it is not about selling, but about being there, even if it still reminds them of the brand. Cosmetic companies have also released positive messages. A well-known makeup brand introduced the hashtags #torneràilsorriso
(#smilewillcomeback
) in its commercial with the song Ritornerai, showing a series of images of happy moments and memories of life before the emergency, such as visiting a city or going out with friends. It is therefore interesting to understand how consumers have responded to this change. In particular, we will study the patterns in Italian tweets in response to the aforementioned paradigm shift in advertising for some well-known brands in the food and consumer goods industries. This aspect makes the research design special and deviates from traditional approaches based on systematic reviews.2.2 The vector space model for text mining techniques
3 Data preparation
GetOldTweets3
(Mottl 2019), which overrides the official time limit of the standard API—due to which it is not possible to obtain tweets older than a week—by using a direct browser search for the given query and scraping the tweet informations. In advance, we created a list of search terms that included the names of the brands appearing in the commercials, the hashtags they launched, and more general search terms such as “TV commercial” or “coronavirus TV commercial”. The reference period for the analysis of the tweets was the period from 2020/01/01 to 2020/06/30. After extracting the raw data, the following fields were identified for each tweet: Date, ID, content of the tweet, the search terms matched during extraction.-
Removing tags (such as @, retaining the hashtag
#
) and URLs. -
Removing of punctuation marks.
-
Removing strings consisting of sequences of the same letter.
-
Removing numbers.
-
Removing extra spaces.
-
Converting to lowercase.
-
Removing stop words.
-
Phase before the lockdown: from 2020/01/01 to 2020/03/08.
-
Phase during the lockdown: from 2020/03/98 to 2020/05/03 (on May 3, 2020, the so-called phase 2 begins).
-
Phase after lockdown: from 2020/04/05 to 2020/06/30.
4 Exploratory analysis
4.1 Crude frequency analysis
tidyverse
(Silge and Robinson 2016; Wickham et al. 2019). To better understand whether and how attitudes toward television advertising have actually changed, a preliminary descriptive analysis of the number of tweets posted and words used during the analysed period was conducted. This analysis is based on the rule that the higher the media exposure, the more a brand is appreciated, and that collective awareness, regardless of reputation, is in itself an indicator that can also become a decision factor for consumers.-
3129 (14.91%) tweets in the pre-lockdown period (Pre).
-
11,423 (54.44%) tweets in the period during the lockdown (Dur).
-
6430 (30.65%) tweets in the period after the lockdown (Post).
#Lavazza
reached the third position among the trends on Twitter in Italy that day and became a Trending Topic.
beautiful
, great
or new
, or words such as humanity
and like
and words with negative emotion polarity such as dictator
and controversy
. The most common word is charliechaplin
, the absolute star of the commercial with his speech about humanity based on the famous movie The Great Dictator. The presence of terms with negative content is explained by the fact that this commercial has caused a wide debate among Twitter users. On the one hand, it was appreciated as a masterpiece that evokes positive feelings for humanity in crisis. On the other hand, it was strongly criticised because it was seen as a rhetorical display of good feelings and goodwill towards other people. However, it should be noted that Lavazza’s previous commercials were more humorous and focused on the goodness of the product, the opposite of this new commercial launched on May 7, 2020, which is based on the emotional message about the progress of humanity, revealing a very obvious paradigm shift in the structure of the message.
#Istayathome
and #everythingwillbefine
, but also emergency
, which perfectly fits that moment, and are justified by the massive use of such hashtags to comment on or end any written conversation. In particular, #Istayathome
was launched by the social account of the Ministry of Health, which called for a massive spread. The call was welcomed by many brands, which in turn influenced consumers.
Italy
, thankyou
and new
also play an interesting role. The latter (new
) seems to refer to the ‘new world’ described in the speech of the great dictator from the Lavazza advertisement mentioned above. Moreover, the new advertising approach of the different brands seems to have been perceived as such and to have evoked a sense of appreciation and gratitude (thankyou
) and a sense of belonging (Italy
) among consumers. The evolution of thankyou
and Italy
over time confirms their particular use in the context of this contingent situation, as they accounted for no more than 1% of the relative daily frequency of tweeted words before the lockdown. These dynamic effects can be well documented by looking at the time series of daily occurrence of a particular term. Figure 5 shows the graphs for the terms thankyou
and Italy
as examples. In particular, thankyou
peaks at 40 occurrences per day in the middle of the lockdown period and then drops dramatically to its usual average level before the lockdown. The word Italy
shows a very similar trend.
4.2 TF-IDF analysis
#everythingwillbefine
, #Istayathome
, #wewillmakeit
, #distantbutclose
), which do not normally appear frequently in comments on television commercials. Not all terms that occurred most frequently during the lockdown were also frequently used after the lockdown. This initial rough dynamic analysis seems to indicate that the change in attitude toward advertising that occurred during the lockdown appears to be temporary. In fact, after the lockdown, we can observe a significant decrease in the frequency of terms that had characterized the lockdown period, and the reappearance of terms related to sports events (such as #naplesjuventus
or #italiancupcocacola
). It is very likely that in this phase commercials were again considered not as a moment of aggregation or expression of values of national solidarity, but as elements of disruption of television programs.
5 Dynamic analysis of topic evolution
5.1 Hierarchical Dirichlet-Multinomial mixtures
5.2 Variational estimation
5.3 Data preparation and results
t | Period | \(n^{(t)} (\%)\) | \(\lambda _{1}^{(t)\star } \times 100\) | \(\lambda _{2}^{(t)\star } \times 100\) |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | (from 2020-01-01 to 2020-01-15) | 297 (1.42) | 0.48 | 99.52 |
2 | (from 2020-01-16 to 2020-01-31) | 416 (1.98) | 92.09 | 7.91 |
3 | (from 2020-02-01 to 2020-02-14) | 543 (2.59) | 5.53 | 94.47 |
4 | (from 2020-02-15 to 2020-02-28) | 982 (4.68) | 95.88 | 4.12 |
5 | (from 2020-03-01 to 2020-03-15) | 2525 (12.03) | 73.64 | 26.36 |
6 | (from 2020-03-16 to 2020-03-31) | 3757 (17.91) | 72.60 | 27.40 |
7 | (from 2020-04-01 to 2020-04-15) | 3419 (16.29) | 42.24 | 57.76 |
8 | (from 2020-04-16 to 2020-04-30) | 2064 (9.84) | 70.73 | 29.27 |
9 | (from 2020-05-01 to 2020-05-15) | 3514 (16.75) | 73.61 | 26.39 |
10 | (from 2020-05-16 to 2020-05-31) | 1375 (6.55) | 96.75 | 3.25 |
11 | (from 2020-06-01 to 2020-06-15) | 995 (4.74) | 95.31 | 4.69 |
12 | (from 2020-06-16 to 2020-06-30) | 1095 (5.22) | 5.18 | 94.82 |
#mediaset
(one of the main commercial TV operators) and #jingle
, proving that TV commercials played an important role in conveying the widespread emotions during this period of the pandemic. These data, matched with raw frequency analyses, confirm that the role of advertising on TV did indeed change during the lockdown and was perceived as a vehicle for solidarity and positive emotions to bridge the worst period of the pandemic in our country.
#social
appearing only in the background component. The situation becomes even more evident in period 12, considering that since June 11, 2020, containment measures have been further relaxed and gambling and betting offices, theaters and cinemas, cultural and social centers were reopened (and since June 3, mobility between regions was fully possible again). This situation is reflected in the top-10 terms: although direct references to social media or Facebok are present, the most important term refers to a sports event, while those related to the dimension of emotion and gratitude have largely disappeared.
Italy
, whose probability of occurrence remains roughly stable throughout the period considered). Thus, although the link between some frequently occurring terms and the new dimension of advertising campaigns launched during the most acute phase of the emergency is undeniable, it is equally obvious that this effect is temporary and does not correspond to a permanent paradigm shift in advertising.
new
, which has an unusual temporal trend with two peaks in the first and last parts of the curve. In the first phase, the spike in occurrence can certainly be related to the fact that the virus was initially named as the ‘new 2019 coronavirus’ (2019-nCoV) and then renamed to its current name SARS-Cov-2 in February 2020. On the contrary, as we have already noted, the second spike could apparently be related to the new world described by the Great Dictator in the influential Lavazza advertisement, or even to the new phase of the pandemic beginning on May 3, 2020, at the end of the most severe phase of the emergency.
6 Discussion and conclusions
Italy
, thankyou
, and new
, which were among the most frequently used in tweets, along with the hashtags #Istayathome
and #everythingwillbefine
. Thus, the novelty of the brand’s advertising approach seems to have primarily created a sense of gratitude and belonging that was not present before, as TV commercials were usually perceived as disruptive elements.