Nuovi modelli familiari negli spot delle auto

This article deals with the semiotic analysis of advertising in the automotive sector, starting from a research carried out a few years ago, in which I analyzed five commercials of minivan cars (from 2009 to 2014). The aim of that study was to see which type of family was represented in these commercials and how it was represented. The findings highlighted that, in advertising, a traditional representation of family prevailed, whereas signs of social transformations were still less frequent. Now, I try to update that work by analyzing some commercials of familiar–car, from 2015 to 2020. In this interval of observation, changes have been numerous: among them, the focus on the practical (technological) valorization of the cars and the accent on individualism in the representation of the actors. Therefore, the representation of family seems less present and less marked than in the past corpus, but it is not absent: as usual, the advertising language metabolizes social innovations carefully and represents them gradually, without destabilizing the public.