Sounding out i’m lovin’ it – a multimodal discourse analysis of the sonic logo in commercials for McDonald’s 2003–2018

While the sonic logo for McDonald’s i’m lovin’ it campaign has been widely distributed and highly praised, little is known about the actual characteristics and meaning potentials of this particular musical discourse. From the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis, this paper seeks to unravel the discourse of the sonic logo as it appears in a collection of 475 commercials from the first fifteen years of the campaign. By adopting an otherwise rarely found diachronic perspective, the examination reveals how the sonic logo changes over time and thereby produces alternating meaning potentials. To account for these changes, the paper offers the concepts of alteration and adaptation. Based on these concepts, the paper reveals novel insights into how music can perform a determinative role in the multimodal discourse. In addition to the traditional functions of sonic logos, the music serves to engage viewers in appropriating the slogan of the campaign. This process is specified as the production of an emotive, which imply an instigation of an emotional engagement–related to current values and ideologies–beyond the more familiar capacities of music to express and induce emotions.