"The Podcast is the New Blog": Oral Communication in Global Marketing before, during and beyond Covid-19

Though less popular than in the US, podcast listening during the Covid-19 pandemic has increased in Europe. Yet, while being cooped up at home has apparently unlocked new opportunities for this innovative multimodal genre, little or no systematic investigation into podcasts’ use, other than in Education, has appeared to date, especially in those professional contexts where Covid-19’s impact is most significant. With these objectives in mind, the individual sequences of three marketing podcast/vodcast series were analysed multimodally using a metadiscursive approach that systematically connects basic functional units to macrolevel features characteristic of podcasts’ generic structure potential. The analysis accounts for deviations from generic expectations and reveals how the sociosemiotic affordances of visual, sound and other iconographic and indexical systems permeate a predominantly oral genre and how their systematic identification helps analysts make sense of the flow of discourse. The results also open up prospects for future research which could apply this methodology to other relatively unstructured, grassroots multimodal genres.