Aswangs in the City: Locating and Defining the Linguistic Landscape Spaces of Trese’s Marketing Campaign
Around
June 2021, there was an episode in one corner of the social media landscape
where CCTV footage of aswangs or monsters circulated among users. Like a
scenario of an urban legend coming to life, the said monsters were ripping
apart a few billboards for an upcoming Netflix show. Aside from the CCTV
footage, related photos of vandalized billboards across the country, purported
to be of the same culprit, were uploaded and passed around until “it reached
the media.” In screaming red paint, they demand the main character of that
Netflix show to leave the city being claimed by the aswangs. Episodes like this,
and more, provided its fair share of entertainment to a nation living through
restrictions for a year, and whose lives have been disrupted by the pandemic.
For a moment, people noticed an artifact of the outside world once more.
What
happened was a “guerilla marketing” strategy for the show, Trese, an
anime adaptation of a hit Filipino graphic novel with the same name. It was commissioned
by Netflix, a global online streaming platform, through Gigil, a local
advertising agency that focus on creating disruptive campaigns for their
clients. The titular character mediates between the world of humans and
supernatural creatures where power balance is threatened by those who abuse
power from both sides. She seeks to maintain balance by investigating crimes of
supernatural origin and enforce the agreement of the two different worlds to
coexist.
This study will look at the Trese marketing campaign as a model for a multimodal analysis grounded on social semiotics, and as an opportunity to locate the actual space that linguistic landscape studies can cover in studying these billboards in the context of the pandemic, given that digital media and connectivity expands the LL beyond its physical placement. If it helps to illustrate the framework, the study looks at the entire campaign as a text that draws from both traditional and contemporary Filipino culture and society.
Background
of the Study
Linguistic landscape studies (LLS) have been one of the fastest evolving fields in the study of language in the recent years. The interest of the study has moved from looking at static public signs to quickly considering the new types added through recent technological developments as part of the landscape. Signs such as electronic flat panel displays, LED neon lights, foam boards, electronic message centers, interactive touch screens, inflatable signage, and scrolling banners. Similarly, among both top-down and bottom-up signs, the interest of LLS has gone beyond “linguistic items found in the public space,” (Shohamy in Gorter, p. 191), “environmental print” (Huebner in Gorter, p. 191), or “the words on the walls” (Calvet in Gorter, p. 191). Surely, we cannot say that the chosen material for this study are just “words on the wall” or a simple linguistic instance. A lot would be missed if such a perspective will be used on one of the most lauded local marketing campaigns in recent times, landing as one of the “10 Most Attention-Catching Ad Campaigns of 2021” in a local online magazine. (spot.ph)
Billboards
Billboards are
large outdoor structures that hold visible media high traffic areas for
advertising purposes. (Suyanto in Perdana) They belong to a big category of
out-of-home advertising (OOH), until they became the embodiment of the medium. The
size of the platform has captive audience reading from long distances such as
walking pedestrians and people in cars who spend an average of two hours per
day in major roads, (SCMI in United Neon). With that, OOH have the 2nd
highest market penetration next to free TV. (CMV Basic in United Neon) It is
accepted in the industry that “it is one of the world’s most effective means in
communicating messages across different types of audiences.” As “the first and
longest living type of advertising there is.” (qbf.com) These large billboards,
as part of a landscape, can wield so much power can define the atmosphere if
used properly. Imagine the shock factor of Trese’s vandalized billboards
as it looms over LLs across the Philippines.
When the pandemic
began in 2020, a lot of businesses laid off staff and decrease their spending.
The advertising industry suffered, most especially in the OOH department
because people were no longer going outside due to restrictions. As the country
was trying to shift to the “new normal,” businesses turned to social media
advertising as Filipinos have been highly engaged in digital media during the
pandemic. This engagement has also been driven with the shutting down of
ABS-CBN, the country’s biggest free TV network in terms of reach and audience
share. It might seem like a total exodus from OOH, but this drive to digital
would still need resource from the real world. And that is how Trese was able
to marry advertising in LL to more personal communication platforms that
utilize the Internet and social media.
Trese and Guerilla Marketing
There’s usually a
template on how producers choose to promote their shows. There would always be
a campaign that follows a messaging determined, and Netflix being a Global
brand would localize their marketing campaigns by region or country. It has
long begun when Trese have been greenlit for
a Netflix adaptation. Fans who have been caught up with anticipation on how the
production will commence created buzz in debates, pushing their ideals and expectations
for the show. We are not going to answer these here, but all these questions seemed
to have been drowned out by the the promotional campaign that ensued, and Trese
became the number 1 film on Netflix Philippines within 24 hours of its release.
(Gigil TV)
Guerrilla marketing
relies on unconventional, unexpected but memorable tactics to create awareness
for a brand, product, service, or even a company. Such tactic uses spectacle,
wit, and humor to capture people’s attention. The term came from Jay Conrad
Levinson’s book, Guerilla Advertising. They are intended to be disruptive,
bordering to anti-establishment. Guerilla marketing strategies with the
likes of Netflix’s Trese are meant to drive conversations beyond the
physical space. But would still be targeted to a specific market segment in a
specific locality. Producing user-generated content (UGC), like shared videos,
photos or stories from consumers online would be one of objectives to further
spread the awareness about the product.
The creative producers
of the signs come from a local advertising agency called Gigil, who brands
itself as a disruption company. They have been tapped by Netflix to create a
campaign to sell Trese. The brief was to create something that is “maangas,”
which can translate to “badass.” And in their Senior Art Director, JR
Bumanglag’s words, something that “would really blow up."
(Bumanglag in Eugenio) The idea was to have some people rappel down the
billboards to vandalize it with spray paint, which they did not push through
because of safety concerns, and the organic essence of the gimmick might fail
if they get caught. It took Tropical Storm Dante to make this happen. Billboards
in Metro Manila had to be taken down before the typhoon comes out of caution.
And that’s when they took the chance to vandalize Trese billboards. Meanwhile,
they filmed CCTV-quality videos of aswangs doing the act and was released as a
“leaked CCTV footage” into the internet by Gigil’s interns and new hires.
(Eugenio)
The billboard
released across the Philippines had one clean design released in two languages,
and the same look for the vandalized versions that appeared in three languages.
The placement of the billboards “needed to be in capital cities…, and
provinces, and high traffic roads.” The English copy for the vandal text and
headline are placed in Manila, Cebu and Davao. Tagalog was used for those
deployed in the provinces. For Cebu and Davao, English was preferred for the
headline, while they have been vandalized in Bisaya.
The story in this
campaign linearly starts from the clean billboards. It already gives a feel of
the show as a modern fantasy that has a mysterious and fierce female
protagonist. As the anticipation and excitement builds up, the billboards
suddenly get vandalized. The photos, together with theories and suspicions
about circulates online. Leaked CCTV footage of Philippine mythological
creatures destroying the billboards follow. These videos confirm and deny
speculation about the nature of the video as a staged spectacle to promote the
show or something else otherwise. A months later, Gigil released a case study
video of the campaign, revealing the result of the campaign: Trese topped the
show on Netflix on its first week. This is quite a linear way to look at it, if
we are just going to look at the landscape, i.e. what’s seen on the videos and
the photos. The real story is not linear. It engages the online public with the
semiotic systems in place.
Theoretical Framework
This study deals heavily
with discourse convoluted by the blurring lines of the different roles of media
in language, visuals, and platform in meaning making. As we look at the
meanings exchanged in the linguistic landscape, we are always faced with the
question, what to make of it? Iedema mentions the changes in our “semiotic landscape”
and a better appreciation of our multimodal meaning-making and “multi-semiotic
development… that requires attention to more than one semiotic than just language-in-use.”
(Iedema p. 33)
Meanwhile, Scollon
and Scollon provided a method that can look at different aspects of a landscape
based on semiotic systems. He looked at LL as an index of social meanings
through the integration of those systems that constitute the signs “in place,”
in a discipline called geosemiotics. Their approach meant to capture aspects of
the meanings of discourses in daily human life beyond language by treating the
linguistic landscape and the signs as texts. These texts are constituted by
meaning, from socio-cultural relationships, that involves written language, visual
elements and people, and the language users’ choices.
“All semiotic
systems operate as ‘social semiotic’ systems… In producing meanings we must
make choices; as we make choices we preference one option over another. All
semiotic systems operate as systems of social positioning and power
relationship both at the level of interpersonal relationships and at the level
of struggles for hegemony among social groups in any society precisely because
they are systems of choices.”
Social semiotics,
then, proclaimed to be about the analysis of not static sign systems or text
structures, but of socially situated sign processes (Lemke, 1988; Thibault,
1991a).
Language manifests
through these three semiotic systems at the social and geosemiotic levels:
Interaction order –
the system that drive human social interaction, where discourse is a major
organizing system. It is, in itself, a semiotic object. These can cover the
comments section, where everyone involved is a social actor. The producers of
the sign can also be considered part of the system.
Visual semiotics – this
refers to the images in the signs, which include the graphics, picture, design,
and how they are produced as meaningful wholes for visual interpretation. (Kress
and Van Leuwen in Scollon and Scollon)
Place semiotics – this refer to other elements that build context outside the two previous systems. This could include the “built in” environment - architecture and urban planning of where the sign is located.
Data and Method
When the research
started, months already passed since the premiere of the series. The art
director of the creative team mentioned that the clean version of the
billboards were up for a week, and the vandalized versions were up for 2-3
weeks. (Bumanglag 2022) What were left to me as data are videos and photos from
the producers and the consumer’s posts in social media. It would have been
quite a challenge anyway to be gathering data on the ground during the pandemic
with the constantly changing quarantine restrictions and other limitations. Even
the producers of this campaign also recounted some difficulties in mounting
this event. However, there are opportunities facilitated by the Internet, and
perhaps the nature of the signs, that allowed me to gather data. Since a
guerilla marketing strategy is meant to create a story to be popularized, it
would be documented in social media. We may not be able to get a live reaction
of a passerby, but countless resources that interacts with the material are
available in the web. We consider each commenter as a social actor in
geosemiotics that brings with them context, “all of his or her history of
experience, knowledge (whether conscious or unconscious), and interests, motivations,
and dispositions.” (Scollon and Scollon p.15)
Specifically, the following will be used as our
data:
1.
existing photos that circulated
online, some of which are still up in social media sites and online news outlets
to discuss the nature of the sign.
2.
social media posts and comments
that reflect the reception of Filipino netizens to the sign,
a.
original posts of Netflix and the
discussion present in the comments section
b.
original posts of selected social
media accounts in Facebook and Twitter which generated a considerable amount of
engagement
The comments and posts will be
grouped according to the meanings that would appear in the discussion.
While drawing from Scollon
and Scollon’s three broad semiotic systems as tools for analysis, we will also
be supporting it with Iedema’s multimodality and resemiotization to cover the
space of the signs in place as they encroach into the digital space. The term
multimodality was introduced to highlight the importance of taking into account
semiotics other than language-in-use, such as image, music, gesture, and so on.
The increased ubiquity of sound, image, film, through TV, the computer and the
internet is undoubtedly behind this new emphasis on and interest in the
multi-semiotic complexity of the representations we produce and see around us.”
(Iedema) Multimodality will be our marker as to where the semiotic systems are
located.
To obtain data, we will look for the actual post of Netflix in Twitter and Facebook, and search for user-generated posts relating to the Trese billboard with the keyword, “Trese billboards.” The results will definitely be affected by the platforms’ curation via the algorithm function, so we will take this into consideration as part of the semiotic system.
Limits and Considerations
The
scope of the study involves looking at archived posts of or about the actual
billboard – images, videos, accounts of people and selected people’s reaction
to the campaign, which are pooled and reviewed by looking at Netflix’s social
media account, searching Twitter and Facebook archives with keywords Trese,
billboard, and the name of the city which it is possibly in place. This is
qualitative research done in a short span of time, so it might not cover
majority of the available resources online.
The
study factors in what the algorithm-based search-optimization would suggest/show
as top posts. We will respond with a meaning-based random sampling which could
validate our target semiotic systems. In actual procedure, this means that the
posts and interactions gathered from social media should have the corresponding
insights that we’ve been looking for.
Analysis
The clean Trese
billboard includes the photo of the anime-main character dressed in her usual
black coat. Her backdrop is a circle of symbols in Filipino baybayin
which reads “the sixth child of the sixth child,” an important detail about her
identity. The circle appears to be overlaid on a city map that rendered in red.
There seems to be some sort of enigma in reading “A NETFLIX ANIME SERIES,” with
Anime being the popular term for animated Japanese cartoons, of a movie that is
basically all about Philippine lore and culture. Yet there is no
straightforward mention of “the first Netflix anime adaptation of something
Filipino…” The clean poster then, announces Trese’s arrival. A story created by
a Filipino, but produced, packaged, and distributed by a Global brand.
It bears the
tagline in Filipino, “kinatatakutan siya ng mga kinatatakutan mo,” in
English versions, “You fear them, they fear her.” The colors of the comic book
have been in solid black and white, but the first new color you’ll see before
jumping into the adaptation is red, as used in the series’ branding. And it is
not incidental that Netflix’s main color is also another shade of red. There’s
even more of red in the rendered “spray paint”-stylized graphic that are
supposed to be the “aswangs” vandalisms on the billboards. They bear the words,
“layas,” “this is our city,” “siyudad namin ‘to!” As noticed by
people online, only the premiere date and the producing company have been
spared from the damage.
In producing social
power relations, Scollon and Scollon mentioned that systems of positioning is
also a system of choices. It’s important to note the choices that was made
here-choosing billboards, a platform that was on the receiving end of the
economic impact of the pandemic on the industry, (Outcomm 2020) and with it, a
guerilla marketing strategy, referring to a transgressive act such as
vandalism, the language choices, and the design. Said strategy has been
popularized to reach consumers who avoid ads, but for this campaign, it gave something
more than that.
Let's consider Trese’s vandalized billboard as a multi-modal text. Mainly using the OOH
platform, we can clearly see in this billboard in Figure 1 from Davao City how
it overpowers the messages in the landscape, as an overtly humongous structure in
proportion to the other commercial signs of small businesses. The angle of the
billboard in Figure 2 is also similar. Then there’s this apocalyptic effect of the
low-traffic urban areas with our billboard above it. The YouTube video uploaded
by the ad agency also show drone shots of the billboards looming over major
highways and toll-express ways such as the Skyway, the NLEX, and SLEX. The
platform of choice is clear. As the first animated adaptation of a critically
acclaimed Filipino comic series, the campaign must be big. In a highway with
very little pedestrian traffic, maybe attributed to the pandemic, the mundane
is shaken by a vandalized billboard. And even if these materials have long been
taken down, the phenomena-inducing documentation and viral spread of these
billboards still carry the message.
Most of the photos of the billboard that circulated in the Internet bear Trese’s tagline in Tagalog, while the aswang vandals were both in Tagalog and English, which could be attributed to the demographic of the people present near the signs. As mentioned earlier, while all the signs were placed in traffic-heavy areas, the language used varied from place to place. Versions of the billboards with the tagline and bilingual (English and Tagalog) vandalisms, as in figure 4, were placed in Manila. Those that use Tagalog in both the taglines and the vandalism, such as in Figures 4 and 5, were deployed to high traffic areas in the provinces and freeways. For Davao and Cebu, they put versions with an English tagline and vandalisms in Bisaya, as in Figure 2.
Figure 1 (LizQuen Socmed Team)
Figure 2
Let’s look at the linguistic choices here. Billboards
require brevity-using as few words as possible to fuse with the visual elements
to convey a big idea. Both the English and tagalog taglines only have 6 words
and one may not have many translations in a single material and expect the
public to read all of them. The tagline is descriptive of “her” and “them”. And
seeing this on towering structures such as billboards might give an eerie
feeling. The language is localized to make the story of fear to be not
culturally distant. The campaign, other than the use of spectacle, wants to tap
into the more emotional side of the consumer.
Dylman, drawing from a Pavlenko and
Caldwell-Harris studies mentions that “research on bilingualism and emotions
has typically found that dominant bilinguals show stronger emotional responses
in their first language (L1) compared to their second language.” (Abstract) And
perhaps, it is meant for dwellers in the provinces. A curiosity here is the use
of English and Tagalog for Manila-deployed billboards when they wrote “This
is our city! Layas, layas, x x x” The success of the series is evident. But
did the story within the campaign and the messaging resonate among Netflix
users in the city? Is there room for trivialities? A few people in social media
responded to the English ones. A netizen already quipped “conyo naman these
aswangs, brodie. [sic]” as shown in Figure 1. “Conyo’, is a colloquial variation
attributed to the the middle class. Another person broke through people’s
suspension of disbelief by saying that the item is a marketing strategy because
it uses English, as if the language makes it even less than it already is.
Let us now look at some notable feedback of consumers online. Netflix posted photos of the defaced billboard on their Facebook page with the caption, “What kind of monster would do this??? If you see something, say something – we’re going to find out who did this <spyglass emoji>.” The language of the caption seemed simple and straightforward, but the second statement feels cryptic: “if you see something, say something,” and as of February 2022, the post had 45,000 reactions and 18,000 shares.
There are the usual positive comments. “This is
brilliant! <3-heart smiling emoji> Can’t wait to watch it!” “This is sooo
bad it looks so goooooooood…” and “cute, may outer glow <awkward smile with
sweat drop emoji>” the last one probably referring to the glow effect around
the graphic vandals to make it appear readable, an artist’s discretion.
Some comments ask
about the show itself, while some recognize it as a marketing gimmick. “This is
what we called strategy.” One person said “I was curious with the billboards…
getting vandalized but yeah, who will climb that high billboard poster?
<rolling laugh-cry emoji> Well played, Netflix. HAHAHAHAHA” It seemed
like he took a while to figure out what it’s about. Meanwhile, a conversation
was started by a netizen who was seemingly displeased with the strategy. He was
looking for the ladder or scaffolding used, and said, “I like this kind of
STUNT… They called it Publicity stunt. Clever! <crazy emoji> Someone
replied and said, “gimik ‘to pre” (this is just a stunt). To which the original
commenter said, “indeed pre… magaling ginastusan. Pinagmukha tayong horrible
country,” acknowledging that it was a publicity stunt which would affect the
country negatively. The next replies was still stuck on his first question
about the medium, and one netizen said “drone, thanks me later.” Was the intent
of the original comment being sarcastic? It would seem like the sarcasm was not
caught by that last reply, and within that conversation, the intent and
understanding among the participants does not follow logic.
Some netizens congratulated the production team
and identified the semiotic systems in place.
“First of all, I
wanna give props to the creative lead of the agency who had the balls to pitch
an OOH execution knowing full well we’re in the middle of a pandemic, where
most white collar workers aren’t commuting every day. Because they KNEW this is
the kind of shit that people stuck at home have been craving for. They KNEW it
would pick up online. I don’t think they got lucky. They knew.
“And mad props to
whomever client side who greenlit an OOH campaign during a lockdown… they knew
the results they were gonna get.”
Other commenters looked at linguistic and cultural aspects of the billboards. Aside from calling the vandals “conyo,” there was an exchange about the usage of the word “siyudad” which translates to “city” in English. No one other than the creator of the Trese comic himself replied, and it appeared that the original commenter is his friend.
Original Commenter: Nice! But no one really says ‘siyudad’ except Google translate, Netflix.
Budjette Tan: …or maybe it’s an entity that’s been alive for hundreds of years??? (92 reactions)
OC: An ancient entity might spell it ‘ciudad.’ WAHAHAHAHAHA / A current vandal might say “Bayan namin ‘to, China layas!” WHOHOOOO!! / Super happy and unbelievably proud of you, Budj. <heart emoji> Hugs
Commenter 2: …maybe the entity is from Iloilo City po where we use “siyudad” for city hahahahah
BT: There you go! / do you really think ancient entities care about spelling?! <three rolling laugh-cry emoji>
The conversation went on with a few more
commenters who aren’t already acquainted with Budjette Tan.
Commenter 3: But bayan means country and siyudad means city. Why would they be interchanged?
OC: (still talking to “Budj”) Agree! Spelling or letter case not relevant to mystical beings! <mythical emojis> / Like lower case “i" in SiYUDAD and caps “I” in NAMIN. / New emojis wheeeeee! <varied emojis>”
Commenter 4: tama po sa baybayin ang siyudad.
OC replying to commenter 3: The billboard was ‘vandalized’ it stands to reason to use language that’s more relaxed, more ‘street.’ Just ribbing, Budj. <wide-smile emoji> (She also replied to Commenter 4 who referred to the baybayin): Galeeng!
It should be noted that in this conversation,
the social actors are aware of the language, while they participate in the accuracy
of the fictionality of the signs. One commenter didn’t seem to think that the
“city” the signs were referring to is the immediate setting of the show. The debate
on the usage of ciudad vs siyudad for city with a commenter making reference to
baybayin shows deeper awareness of culture by a netizen.
But what is culture really to the ordinary Filipino? Or more like, what is the culture of Filipino street art/graffiti? Some commenters were referring to the agency of the vandals to determine if they are legitimate vandals. One who seems like a fan, associates graffiti to a tambay or a local bum. And he says that the vandal must have vestiges of lewdness. He said “Kung tambay gumawa nito. Di sana may ganto?! <nail polish emoji> Anyways excited na ako! <2 variants of heart emojis> <Image: male genitals in red ink>” The comment made 25 people laugh, as evidenced by 25 reactions. Another one said there has to be a fraternity/gang signatory in it, referring to TBS. And lastly, they said that a Filipino would have put lewd marks in it, and a witty reply said “etits and chill,” putting a pun on Netflix. This may also be viewed as transgressive behavior, a way to demonstrate that not everyone is willing to cooperate in this campaign’s performativity. These can be satirical takes on the material itself.
Other people then relate the material to pop culture and politics. Some interpreted it as an “indirect message for the Chinese” who were recently encroaching on Philippine coastal borders. While on Twitter, another one posted his own version of the vandalized posters by manipulating the photos. The vandals read as “Duterte patalsikin!” and “China Layas, amin ang Pinas!” Part of his caption reads, “reminding y’all that the real monsters are those in Power.”
Things can get convoluted online, messages can
get mixed over one and the other. It occurred to me when I saw a compilation of
fan-made Tiktok videos about Trese, in which they condense their reaction to a
specific aspect or character of the show in more or less 60 seconds. One of the
videos, however, was about the marketing campaign. But it was just a reaction.
What to make of it? The video opens with a girl with her hand covering her
mouth in surprise, and the clip is long enough for the viewer to read the text
in all caps that says, “OKAY BUT THE TRESE MARKETING CAMPAIGN IS *CHEF’S KISS*
LIKE HELLO?! LOOK AT THIS,” followed by a montage of photos and videos of all
the OOH marketing materials, the vandalized billboards and leaked videos from
Gigil. The background audio that she used for the entire montage was the audio
of the show’s main trailer, and the final photo in the montage is a screenshot
of a writer’s positive review of the the campaign in a Facebook post, saying
that even marketing campaign [aside from the show itself], has “a story.” This
is clearly an example of a multimodal text. To illustrate what she wanted to
say, the Tiktok user stamped her identity on the video to signify herself as a
social actor/viewer. Images were stitched together as if she wants to create
the story within our reality that is supposedly part and parallel to the
universe that Trese is in. It follows Eco’s argument as highlighted by Iedema,
that “the logics of linear progression and causal or temporal contiguity…
associated with language and linguistic expression are seceding in part to more
disparate, non-linear, non-hierarchical, more freely recombinative, circular
and serialized kinds of representation.” (83).
Conclusion
The Trese Netflix campaign is a story of the linguistic landscape written for multiple screens. It’s an event to be shared among captive audience who are willing to be social actors. How the producers marketed the Trese show reflect how they view Filipino culture and a reflection of the consumers’ state of mind. This includes the language used, most especially on the billboard.
In this research, the semiotic systems that occur in the linguistic
landscape around Trese billboards have been looked at, with particular interest
on related interactions within social media such as Twitter, Facebook and a
little from TikTok. Said platforms, while serving as an archive of people’s
sentiments for recent current events, are also taken into consideration as
venue for the circulation of semiotics. The existence of these platforms have
influenced the nature of the signs greatly across three semiotic systems, and
LL studies as well. For one, it cannot be denied that the availability of
resources online and in social media has made the study possible. Although
there was so much more focus given to the interaction order, while there is a
lack of data on place semiotics. We also consider that the researcher has no
control over the data collated by users online, but an obvious advantage is
reflected in the richness of interaction among social actors. But these data
are more than enough to locate the spaces the linguistic landscape occupy.
The consideration of the digital space in marketing campaigns of this scale
demonstrates the power that the Internet has over our daily realities, which
can semiotically be represented by the linguistic landscape. People have spent
time and used the online space to interact with the signs which doesn’t
necessarily allude it to the series being promoted, through different
linguistic and sociolinguistic registers. We looked at the following data:
1.
Photos of the billboards in
Circulation
2.
Social media posts and comments
that reflect the reception of Filipino netizens from both the producers of the
sign and the viewers.
The photos of the
billboard in circulation came out bilingual – tagline and vandals included. The
official hygienics, which includes the date of launch are the ones in English. While
the producers are conscious of the need to localize, they maintain the authority
of standard language.
Upon scrutiny, it was discovered that the leading messages among the signs centered around first, language, especially what people thought of the different translations of the vandal text. It gave a picture as to how a number of Filipinos interact with the billboard using bilingual and visual-spatial language. And it was demonstrated that people’s language use varies among a lot of people. Second, there is evidence that people are aware of the nature of the sign and are conscious of this event being a marketing gimmick. Yet the interactions showed how the content resonated with a specific group of people online in different ways. Somehow, the uncanny method of the campaign, a guerilla tactic that banks on mystery of the method of how it was vandalized, and the staged ripping of the billboards, was able to allow a slight suspension of disbelief among the commenters, in spite of the knowledge that this is just a campaign. It also created a space where people's sentiments and opinion circulate in the language of their choosing. Which leads us to the third observation wherein people related the post to current events.
The online/digital landscape, most especially through social media, has
shaped the semiotic placement and modality of the Trese billboards in relation to
the demands of the market. It’s still a cultural product intended for profit,
and while it is not a top-down sign, the resources used to produce it can
warrant a power of prominent importance, large enough to influence people’s
sentiments. As it influences people's sentiments, it also becomes reusable content when people try to digitally manipulate the images to put their own message in it, as evidenced by the image that was trying to relate it to Philippine politics. At that point, we also see another example of resemiotization.
The extent of this study is still limited. A quantitative approach might be helpful in the future, and a comparison to similar campaigns during or shortly after this one that came out after the pandemic to have a definitive data on consumer behavior. Data gathering that specifically targets a guerilla marketing effort such as this one could yield more results and, and this might entail waiting it out on new campaigns that certain known entities might release.
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