Cross-Cultural Persuasive Strategies in Saudi and British Anti-Smoking Advertisements: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Smoking is a major cause of preventable death globally despite decades of tobacco control efforts, including antismoking campaigns. While interest in the cross-cultural dynamics of public health discourse has grown, only few studies have systematically compared multimodal strategies across different cultural contexts. This study contributes to this under researched area by investigating how Saudi and British anti-smoking advertisements differ in their persuasive strategies and what these differences reveal about their cultural contexts. This study employs a qualitative, multimodal discourse analysis approach to examine anti-smoking advertisements by applying Kress and van Leeuwen's framework to the visual mode and the textual level of Fairclough’s framework to the verbal mode. The aim is to interpret culturally embedded persuasive strategies through a comparative lens. The corpus was purposively sampled, consisting of six anti-smoking advertisements: three produced by the Saudi Ministry of Health and three by the British National Health Service, all published between 2018 and 2023. The advertisements were paired based on similarity in three shared themes: (i) respiratory system, (ii) smoker's experience, and (iii) pregnancy. The analysis revealed a consistent pattern: Saudi advertisements relied heavily on fear-based, loss-framed appeals conveyed through an authoritative verbal tone. British advertisements, by contrast, favoured hope-based, gain-framed messaging, using inclusive language to construct viewer engagement. These findings suggest that the effectiveness of public health communication lies not only in content but also in its resonance with cultural values. This study highlights the importance of culture in shaping the multimodal construction of persuasion. It extends the application of multimodal discourse analysis to understudied cultural domains and invites future research on culturally sensitive health communication. Highlights: The study offers a systematic comparative multimodal analysis of Saudi and British anti-smoking advertisements using Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2021) framework. It identifies culturally different persuasive strategies: Saudi advertisements rely on fear-based, loss-framed appeals; British ones favour hope-based, gain-framed messaging. The paper contributes to the underexplored area of Arabic visual discourse within public health communication. The findings illustrate how visual and verbal resources are mobilised differently across collectivist and individualist cultures to convey health messages.