Constructing Brand Memory Through Melodrama in Greek Advertising: Jumbo's 2019 Christmas Commercial "The Sailor"

Abstract This article examines the Greek Christmas advertisement Jumbo antistrofi metrisis 2019 - O naftikos! (Jumbo αντίστροφη μέτρηση 2019 - Ο ναυτικός!; Jumbo Countdown 2019 - The Sailor!) as a cultural text situated at the intersection of cinema, television, online video, and participatory digital culture. It argues that the commercial does more than promote products: it appropriates recognizable codes of family and maritime melodrama in order to activate memories of childhood, festive time, family absence, sacrifice, and expectation. The theoretical framework brings together memory studies and genre theory, drawing on Halbwachs’s collective memory, Assmann’s cultural memory, Nora’s lieux de mémoire, Erll’s intermedial circulation, Hirsch’s postmemory, and Landsberg’s prosthetic memory, alongside Altman’s semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic model, Neale’s account of repetition and difference, and the contributions of Brooks, Gledhill, Elsaesser, and Williams to melodrama theory. Methodologically, the study combines qualitative interpretive analysis, close reading of the video, and an indicative reading of public YouTube comments as evidence of reception. The article shows that the advertisement constructs brand memory not merely as logo recall but as culturally embodied mnemonic attachment: the brand becomes linked to emotional schemas recognized as “our own,” as part of a collective and popular experience. Its effectiveness lies precisely in its capacity to transform a commercial promise into a narrative of emotional and moral recognition. Keywords: Cultural memory, melodrama, advertising, brand memory, Greek audiovisual culture.