Audience Response to PETA’s Shock Advertise Poster: A Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the People's Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) campaign strategy through its controversial poster featuring anthropomorphic animals consuming human babies, aimed at questioning the morality of animal slaughter for human consumption. The research employed a semiotic analysis of a poster and combined with a sentiment analysis to analyze audience response using comments obtained from PETA's Facebook. The study focused on visual grammar elements such as iconography, attributes, settings, gaze and pose, and the emotional tone present in comments. The findings show PETA employed confident artistic choices ranging from the well-chosen tone and color associated with greed and pleasure, placing the unsettling scene at the center of the imagery, gaze, the pose to convey the action process to achieve the goal, and the shape of all characters in the middle of a grotesque scene to evoke the viewers' emotional response—meanwhile, the sentiment analysis results negatively towards PETA's shock advertising strategy. The study supports the knowledge of PETA's strategic approach to implementing provocative elements to promote animal welfare and question the morality of animal exploitation.