Abstract
In an era marked by escalating climate anxiety and heightened consumer scrutiny, multinational corporations (MNCs) increasingly deploy digital advertising campaigns to construct compelling narratives of corporate environmental responsibility. This study investigates the visual and multimodal strategies employed by leading global enterprises to communicate sustainability commitments within digital media environments. Utilizing a social semiotic framework grounded in Roland Barthes' rhetoric of the image and Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen's grammar of visual design, we systematically analyze a curated corpus of 120 static and video advertisements distributed across prominent digital platforms between 2021 and 2023. Our analysis unpacks the denotative and connotative codes embedded in visual representations of nature, technological innovation, and eco-friendly consumerism. The findings reveal a pervasive reliance on idealized pastoral aesthetics, chromatic greening, and anthropomorphic visual metaphors, which systematically conflate corporate commercial expansion with ecological stewardship. We identify three dominant ideological paradigms: technocratic optimism, pristine conservationism, and individual moral responsibility. These visual strategies frequently mask ongoing ecological externalization by displacing systemic industrial accountability onto consumer lifestyle choices. Ultimately, this research illuminates how digital visual culture functions as an ideological apparatus for symbolic legitimation, contributing to critical media literacy and informing future regulatory frameworks surrounding corporate environmental communication in digital spaces.
