ABSTRACT

This paper presents a visual analysis of 1,236 Instagram posts from cannabis brands during the immediate period after Canada’s 2018 cannabis legalization. Promotional texts crafted by brands, whether print advertisements or social media content marketing, are rich sociocultural communicators. For decades critical scholars have analyzed deeper ideological stories from the common tropes, codes, and clichés of consumer advertising. Situated in this established body of literature but applied to a novel and recently introduced consumer product (legal cannabis) on a twenty-first-century promotional platform (Instagram), this research identifies the common visual clichés used by cannabis brands and analyzes their underlying sociocultural meanings. The findings locate seven visual clichés that ultimately fetishize cannabis as a commodity by hollowing out its labor contexts, objectifying it, and then re-filling it with arbitrary desires and feelings. The analysis suggests that commodity representations of legal cannabis are aided by the use of long-deployed advertising codes. The reliance on these codes can be attributed to a unique combination of factors: the meta-marketing goal of normalizing cannabis in addition to promoting individual brands, the necessity of navigating regulations, as well as the hyper-stylized visual culture of Instagram.

摘要

本文对加拿大 2018 年大麻合法化后不久的 1,236 篇来自大麻品牌的 Instagram 帖子进行了可视化分析。品牌制作的促销文本，无论是平面广告还是社交媒体内容营销，都是丰富的社会文化传播者。几十年来，批判性学者从消费者广告的常见比喻、代码和陈词滥调中分析了更深层次的意识形态故事。这项研究位于这个既定的文献体系中，但适用于二十一世纪促销平台 (Instagram) 上一种新颖且最近推出的消费品（合法大麻），该研究确定了大麻品牌使用的常见视觉陈词滥调，并分析了它们潜在的社会文化意义。调查结果找到了七个视觉陈词滥调，最终通过挖空大麻的劳动环境，将其客观化，然后用任意的欲望和感觉重新填充它，最终将大麻迷恋为一种商品。分析表明，使用长期部署的广告代码有助于合法大麻的商品代表。对这些代码的依赖可归因于多种因素的独特组合：除了推广个别品牌之外，大麻正常化的元营销目标、导航法规的必要性以及 Instagram 的超风格化视觉文化。