ADVERTORIAL IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF SCIENCE POPULARIZATION

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the participation of the advertorial in the transmission of knowledge. It presents a short history of science popularisation and focuses on advertorial, defined as a form of advertisement giving detailed description of the product in the form of an article. In order to show how scientific information is delivered and diffused via the advertorial, the author proposes two case studies in the perspective of French Discourse Analysis. The article unveils a pseudoscientific nature of this kind of commercials. It demontrates that the info-persuasive function (Adam, Bonhomme 1997:47), fundamental for advertorial as a genre, clearly prevails over the educational function, demarcating the frontiers of scientific popularization in publicity.