Abstract:

In a consumer culture where consumption habits are shaped by cultural factors and consumption has become an object of culture, special days have become a marketing strategy identified with consumption. While advertising texts, which reflect the social structure of the period and undertake the task of being a culture carrier in itself, ensure the continuity of the consumption culture, special day advertisements increase their importance and volume continuously within this culture. This study examines the changing structure of special days in relation to social, cultural, and political events. The analysis is conducted using a purposeful sample of 13 New Year’s advertisements published and broadcast in the Cumhuriyet Newspaper throughout the history of the Republic. The changing structure of advertising texts related to special occasions, which have turned into days of gift giving and receiving with the increasing dominance of consumer culture over society, was analyzed on the axis of Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual framework using Norman Fairclough’s discourse analysis method, and in line with the analysis, the transformations experienced were evaluated in terms of consumer culture. According to the research results, it was observed that while New Year’s advertisements from the first years of the Republic onwards contained messages about buying gifts, the messages containing good wishes, which were at the forefront in the first period, were replaced by messages about product/service promotion and campaigns as they approached the present day. Besides, the target audience shifted from the class with cultural capital to the class with purely economic capital, and buying gifts on New Year’s Eve was made a norm through advertisements.

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