Professor Eija Ventola
University of Helsinki, Finland

Plenary title: Marketing Mozart – Multimodality and ‘Consuming Great Personalities’
 
Plenary abstract: This presentation concentrates on discussing the role of multimediality and multimodality in the field of tourism (how meanings are created through verbal messages, pictures, sounds, etc. and transmitted by various media), i.e. explaining how multisemiotic theory can be applied to analysis of texts in tourism. Of particular interest is to see what happens to celebrities (both living and dead) in the process of marketing in tourism. A point of illustration will be Mozart, this year’s focus of tourism, and how he, his personality, in fact anything connected with him, has become a semiotic concept in Salzburg and Vienna and throughout the whole world.
Due to the celebration of his 250^th birthday, an extensive tourist industry has been built around Mozart. His music and the events and objects advertised in his name, etc. are naturally essential for the economy of the important cities connected with him, Salzburg and Vienna, but also other cities profit from marketing him this year. The focus will not only be on the multisemiotic ways Mozart is construed as a marketable personality by museums, by various concert events and their advertising, by various products that are sold in his name, but also, to a considerable extent this year,  by the texts produced in Internet and other media. 
 
This strand/parallel session is provisionally divided into:

a) first day: to be decided

b) second day: to be decided

The strand/parallel session covers the following sectors:
Multimodal studies of tourist cities, museums and art  galleries (open air, virtual etc.), multimodal semiotics of buildings, shops, city layouts and their design.

Strand organisation and presentation: