Dealing with Deals: A Comparative Study of the Promotional Discourse in Online Coupon Advertising

The chapter presents an investigation about English in the Digital Age. It looks at online deals–of–the–day, represented as an evolution of traditional print ads and viewed as a new promotional genre that exploits the advantages of the Internet medium. It analyses a corpus of ads that appeared on the popular multinational platform Groupon in the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy. The aim is to highlight differences in the advertising styles adopted in the 3 countries, in an attempt to identify both transnational dimensions and localised elements. The study pinpoints convergences and divergences across the three languages and concludes stating that: «[a]dvertisements are influenced and can reflect differences between cultures and markets». Despite this, they «help to create a new global culture which ignores national boundaries».