Information communication technologies accelerated numerous trends in the world including the shift to online communication and further content digitalization. Technological innovations reverberate throughout complex social and demographic trends which make a significant impact on business, international companies including. The article focuses on linguistic analysis of the current changes in advertising and branding, mainly in the fashion industry. COVID-19 pandemic with online communication and remote work contributed to further transformation of choice, preferences, and options as well as to popularity of social media as an instrument of information search, as the environment for communication and sharing opinions. Lockdowns and quarantines during COVID-19 pandemic, lack of direct contact with clients entailed the shift to online marketing and advertising. Looking for effective online marketing instruments some companies select storytelling as a basis for their videos. Underpinned theoretically by multimodal discourse analysis and narrative studies, this paper shows how storytelling with its appeal to emotions and memorability potential is becoming a noticeable marketing trend and advertising strategy against the background of current radical technological changes in the information abundant world. Companies manufacturing lux products began to diversify marketing strategies and generate multimodal narrative – a string of stories about the brand, its founders, technologies they use. COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift to multimodal videos. During COVID-19 pandemic, fashion houses created marketing masterpieces to attract attention to new collections. They replaced traditional physical shows and set a new perspective for online fashion shows. These short films telling brand stories become chapters of a brand’s lookbook available in social media.

The article is devoted to social media activity of leading British museums, content strategies they implement to share the news and information via multimodal discourse. Museums social media accounts became a significant component of modern online landscape, in particular, during COVID-19 pandemic when millions of people worldwide started looking for some extracurricular recreation, cultural and aesthetic impressions. The pandemic was both, a challenge and an impetus for many museums to increase online presence and intensify their activity on social media. Having faced the closure during the lockdown many museums had to transform their communication on websites and Facebook, Twitter, Instagram to keep in touch with their followers, visitors and members, to inform, educate and entertain the digital audience. Modern technologies helped museums to diversify modes and media, to make social media posts and virtual communication with followers multimodal, to disseminate knowledge in new ways. Leading British museums turned out to be highly innovative and creative and set multimodality. standards in museums communication. Facebook remains the most popular social media platform for museums so the content of Facebook accounts of Madame Tussauds Museum, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Natural History Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum in 2021-2022 was analyzed in terms of multimodality, communication strategies, edutainment, use of elements characteristic of online communication such as hashtags, emoji, conversation style, dialogic principles, user-generated content. Сontent strategies of British museums in Facebook vary depending on their profile. Edutainment, games, puzzles, quizes, light-hearted communication provoke more response, more emotional reaction of followers as well as their engagement into discussions and dialogues, interactive experience.

The article highlights new communication and advertising phenomenon – virtual influencers (VI) or virtual models employed by different brands to promote their collections and goods. Influencer marketing became an effective marketing strategy and profitable trend within the last twenty years. Influencers can be categorized in line with the content they generate, number of followers they have, their specialization, the impact they produce. Influencer marketing flourishes in social media. Celebrities who earned their fame offline are mega-influencers. Virtual influencers are transmedia 3D models created by high-caliber professionals via computer-generated imagery (CGI), animation, computer graphics, multimodality, copywriting with their bio, tastes, hobbies, lifestyle, even political preferences and social values. They are fond of social networking and have accounts in the most popular social media – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. Brands collaborate with social media influencers for narrowcasting young customers, mostly millennials who prefer social media to mass media and perceive virtual reality as a natural component of current civilization and everyday life. Experts believe virtual influencers’ rating is based on wow effect and they won’t be able to outperform celebrities despite high annual income as they are fictional and not emotional. Celebrities as mega-influencers and models fear virtual models will squeeze them out of marketing and advertising, other social media users have Uncanny Valley syndrome. Psychologists claim VI might trigger psychological problems for teenagers as they cannot attain glamorous lifestyle VI promote. Verbal behavior of virtual influencers is molded by copywriters and mirrors characteristics of English used in social media by teenagers and millennials – short simple sentences with acronyms visibly peppered with emoji and hashtags. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter accounts of the most popular influencers Lil Miquela, Bermuda, Shudu were analyzed. The future of virtual influencers lies in synthesis of CGI and artificial intelligence (AI) to generate posts automatically and communicate with followers. Then virtual influencers can be used outside advertising and marketing to make impact on global audience

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COVID-19 pandemic triggered radical changes and transformations in modern world, business, professional fields, communication including. In the wake of lockdowns and quarantines museums had taken a hit too. Museums had to remain accessible and visible, at least in the digital domain, therefore they had to shift to virtual realm, to offer digital services, to increase their activity in social media. Museums faced a number of challenges like dealing with global digital audience, cognitive modelling of the online content and online user. Their efficiency in the digital domain was different, so museums evidenced 10 – 200% increase of online visits and growth of global digital audience. Due to implementation of digital technologies small local museums made a breakthrough to multimodal domain and received international recognition. In pre-pandemic world, museums had been working on their virtual environment, opened virtual-real museums and extended multimodality of exhibitions, making visitors impressions multisensory. During the pandemic virtual exhibitions, virtual tours, films, education material have become more multimodal and interactive. In films and virtual tours the focus was on stories not on 3D image of the exhibits and a standard 360 tour only. They experimented with modes and conquered new media, used multimodal storytelling. Museums tried to create a sense of presence and place and to relocate online visitors from their homes to museums. To encourage children, museums implemented gamification and edutainment strategies, created virtual games. Museums started a new trend – collecting online (collecting COVID-19, BLM), creating Big Data and digital collections which might be used for multi-vector multidisciplinary research. Digital multimodality might become an indispensable component of museum online landscape in the post-pandemic world.