Transitivity Analysis of Social Media Sports Advertisements

This database includes advertisements from top American sports brands, selected from the leading 10 brands in the U.S. market in 2023. First, brands with separate Instagram accounts dedicated to women were chosen to exclude advertisements not targeting women audiences. Second, brands that regularly post advertisements were selected to ensure a sufficient sample size for analysis. Consequently, Nike and Under Armour were the two brands included in the final samples. Advertisements were identified based on their intent to promote products or services for purchase. Altogether 367 videos were identified as advertisements over a one-year period (2023). After collection, duplicated advertisements and advertisements with no speakers were discarded. The sampling approach adopted is purposive, where samples are strategically chosen to align with the study's objectives. Because the length of video advertisements of each brand is different, the longest ten advertisements for each brand were selected as samples, which can avoid videos that are too short to provide effective contextual information. This selection was based on the assumption that longer videos can provide more textual information for analysis. In total, 20 video advertisements published by Nike and Under Armour were collected. There are 36.5-minute-long videos with a combined total of 5987 words. Twenty selected video advertisements were transcribed into texts by Whisper. After text proofreading and revision, the Txt files compile a small-scale corpus. Second, the raw text was imported into the corpus processing software UAM Corpus Tool 3. By analyzing the structure of sentences by manual and automatic annotations, the frequency of different processes of transitivity can be calculated. Subsequently, some texts were selected to analyze transitivity patterns in detail to reveal the portrayal of women in advertisements.