Constructing Financial Services through Mobile Ads: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Digital Campaigns Afriliani
Universitas Terbuka
Abstract
The rapid development of digital financial services has transformed how banks promote their products through mobile campaigns. This study investigates how financial services are constructed through linguistic and visual resources in digital mobile campaigns. The research uses a qualitative, descriptive multimodal discourse analysis focusing on the ideational (representational) metafunction, narrowed for scope to three closely related phenomena: transitivity and grammatical ellipsis in the verbal text, and the construal of Activity in the accompanying images, following Martin and Unsworth^s (2023) system for visual Activity and Occurrence. The data consist of five campaign materials from five Indonesian banking brands (Permata Bank, Bank Mega, UOB, BNI wondr, and Allo Bank). The findings show that the verbal texts are dominated by material processes, followed by relational processes. Most clauses employ imperative, elliptical structures in which the Subject and Finite are omitted, while the implied audience remains recoverable as the Actor of financial action. Visually, all five campaigns construe Activity as a single, not-unfolding moment rather than an unfolding sequence, and in four of the five cases Occurrence is left inferred rather than inscribed through a vector, motion line, or arrow, a visual counterpart to the grammatical ellipsis found in the verbal text. Overall, the study argues that mobile financial campaigns construct banking products as action-oriented, benefit-driven services, in which what is grammatically and visually left unmarked is as meaningful as what is shown.
