The Rise or the Fall of Padideh Empire? Padideh’s controversial news is one of today's heated topics in Iran. How a restaurant in Shandiz, a village near Mashhad, has turned into one of the giants of construction sites and stock market is still an enigma. The shareholders, who are mostly coming from the middle class and have invested all or a mentionable amount of their savings, hope for Iranian version of American dream. That is what Padideh promises in advertisements and labels as “Dream Land” and “Hyper Market” modeled after Western hypermarkets and Disney Land. They are tourism and market centers erected in various cities all over Iran. It seems that Padideh’s advertising strategy embedded in careful timing and its choice of diverse media or its soccer team, different sponsorship, religious and charity activities are the only motifs to buy the shares. Not just the bridges between western, Persian culture and Islamic tradition but also the rumors, the debated and paradoxical news about the company and its director has been magnetizing and frightening different shareholders. The hope and anxiety in the rise and fall of Padideh’s shares represent the sociocultural dimension of media that is shaping, revising and testing society’s values, and evaluation system. Benefiting from the tenets of comparative cultural studies and social semiotics, this paper tries to show that many societies have undergone, not identical, but similar transformation, most notably the case of Enron Company can be mentioned. Through a comparatist lens, the professional communication of Padideh and Enron with their target society and the advertising discourse can be critically analyzed.

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