Provocativeness as a trend of modern media communication (on the example of social advertising of health)

The paper is devoted to the consideration of one of the trends of the modern media discourse - creating provocative content to increase the effectiveness of a communication product. The purpose of the paper is to analyze verbal and visual tools of provocativeness on the material of social advertising texts, to determine the techniques that are most frequent and characteristic of advertising texts with a social focus. On the one hand, messages of this type are focused on broadcasting socially approved behaviors, humanizing society, on the other hand, due to insufficient attention to advertising messages, a limited budget, etc., copywriters are forced to turn to ethically ambiguous ways to arouse the recipient's interest. The material for the study was more than 100 polycode texts of social advertising of health, collected by the method of directional sampling. The author defines provocative advertising, considers the specifics of forming provocative content in non-commercial advertising compared to commercial one. The paper proposes the classification of the functions of provocativeness in the discourse of social advertising, as well as the typology of tools for forming provocative content. The study found that the main methods of provocativeness in healthcare social advertising are an appeal to fear, verbal and visual metaphor, intertextuality, sexualized content, and provocative humor.