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Sport in Advertising • 127

broadcast on the UK television station ITV. Peugeot created a sequence of short ad-
vertisements announcing its sponsorship of the event to play at the beginning and end
of commercial breaks during airtime. The advertisements featured a group of white
male rugby fans driving around France, the host nation for the tournament, compris-
ing an Englishman, a Scotsman, an Irishman and a Welshman. Each character wore
his national team’s rugby shirt and was coded with national stereotypic signifi ers
(e.g. while the others wore shorts, the Scotsman wore a kilt). No rugby was shown
during the advertisements, but their location at the start and end of broadcasts of live
rugby meant that rugby was intertextually referenced by its absence. The absent-
presence of rugby provided the underlying meaning of the advertisement, justifying
the depiction of a group of men driving around through the French landscape, but it
was a meaning supplied by the viewer. The viewer, therefore, was complicit in get-
ting the joke, which hinged on the intimate homosocial environment created by the
four disparate identities inhabiting the space of the car.
The introductory advertisement began with an extremely close shot of the Welsh
character ostensibly adjusting the camera before returning to join the others by the
car posed for a group shot. The narrative, therefore, presented the sequence of ad-
vertisements as a ‘home movie’ documentation of their road trip to the Rugby World
Cup. The body language of the Welshman—frowning with concentration into the
camera lens, running back to the group in an ungainly manner, grinning broadly at
the camera and being the first to introduce himself—connoted an eager, unrefi ned

personality, well intentioned but lacking in poise. The other characters are presented
as more self-controlled (e.g. the Welshman’s hair was uncombed and his beard un-
shaven, while the others were much neater). Placed in front of the group, the En-
glishman’s stance was open and relaxed, while the Irishman was squeezed between
the Welshman and the Englishman and introduced himself with hesitancy, connot-
ing shyness or self-effacement. The Scotsman was the tallest of the group and was

ANALYSING THE PEUGEOT RUGBY WORLD CUP ADVERTISEMENTS
Television advertisements last only a brief time but require a great deal of resources to produce. Ad-
vertisers, therefore, make each detail count. To analyse the series of advertisements created to mark
Peugeot’s sponsorship of the 2007 Rugby World Cup, we applied techniques for analysing television
(see Chapter 3) to each advertisement. We considered it to be even more necessary, however, to
take account of every tiny element of activity in each of the fi ve channels of communication: graph-
ics, image, voice, sound effects and music. As with television, this required us to repeatedly replay
the advertisements to note all the communication. The signifi cation was described for the individual
advertisements at the level of denotation. After that, the connotative associations of the signs with
the advertisements were explored. In particular, absences and gaps in meanings were identifi ed,
where the television viewer was expected to supply missing knowledge to complete the narrative.
Since the advertisements were in a series, we refl ected on the way the continuous narrative required
the viewer to fi ll in gaps between each of the advertisements. In this way, we were able to point to the
way that the viewer supplied the meanings to enable the advertisement to do their work.