Advertisement

As I was surfing through the internet, I stumbled across this smoking advertisement, and it really stood out to me.

This advertisement seems to have more of a persuasive genre, although it could be argued that it is also informational. It is multi-modal as it has both visual and text based aspects, with the medium being digital. The audience is anyone on the internet, but it mostly targets current smokers and those who might possibly be considering such actions. Logos is appealed to in the advertisement through the statistics shown at the top of the picture which explain the amount of deaths per year associated with smoking for Americans alone and how many smokers began their poor habits as teenagers. The picture itself, though, says the most. Appeal to pathos is definitely the priority of this advertisement, hoping to strike fear into the viewer. The use of someone on their deathbed with a tag seen to represent a pack of cigarettes stating, "Smoking kills," is extremely effective, and puts the association of cigarettes and death into the mind of the reader or viewer.

The use of pathos in an advertisement is greatly effective in the art of persuasion because many times people let their feelings make decisions for them before looking at the logic behind something. In this case, the advertisement hits hard in the use of pathos, and then for more rationalized viewers, logos is appealed to through the statistics/facts listed at the top of the page. This makes the ad as a whole unbelievably effective as it targets more than one type of thought process in the readers.