Singing Corporate Social Responsibility: A Multimodal Analysis of the 2018 Budweiser Super Bowl Commercial

Abstract

The 2018 Super Bowl Commercial of the Budweiser Beer is entitled “Stand by You” and revolves around the pluriannual Water Donation Program of the Anheuser-Busch brewing company. The video features images of the employees of the Budweiser Cartersville, GA brewery organizing the emergency drinking water delivery with the help of American Red Cross, its partner in such disaster-relief efforts over the past 30 years. The images are accompanied by a cover of the 1961 Ben E. King iconic song “Stand by me”. Adopting a socio-semiotic multimodal perspective, the paper aims at analyzing the meaning-making construction of the video in its YouTube contextualization. In detail, the focus of the paper is to understand how the sound and the lyrics of the cover, with their cultural, linguistic and semiotic layers of meaning, constitute the semiotic entry point in the narration and create the soundscape for the framing of Corporate Social Responsibility.

Keywords

• multimodality
• social media discourse
• social semiotics
• soundscapes
• systemic-functional linguistics.