Don't eat yourself to death

RHETORICAL USE OF PATHOS IN ADVERTISING

Today, the creators of advertisements spend a lot of time thinking and evaluating the ideas they come up with for their ad campaigns. Advertisements are constantly becoming more and more creative, imaginative, and ingenious. This is extremely important because it keeps the audience and consumers interested, as opposed to boring them with the same old images and commercials. Their intentions change depending on the message they are trying to convey. Some ads are intended to make us laugh with their funny jokes, whereas others try to evoke other emotions such as love, hope, arousal, anger, disgust, fear, sorrow, or sadness.

Above is an advertisement from the “Obesity is suicide” ad campaign. This ad uses pathos to leave its viewers quite disturbed. The creators clearly designed this ad to be serious and did not intend to make their audience smile or laugh. The image displayed in this ad illustrates a strand of sausages tied around the neck of a man who is heavy and overweight. The analogy here is that overeating or eating too many unhealthy foods is equivalent to committing suicide by hanging yourself, in this specific example. Since the initial reaction of most people is to turn their heads away after first glancing at this ad, the scene depicted effectively stirs the emotions of its audience members. Once you have seen this ad, the image sticks in you head for long after having viewed it. This means that the ad campaign is successful in the way that it gets you to not only feel something, but also to remember what you saw and what you felt the moment you were looking at it. As a result, you are left with the feeling that there has to be something you can do to prevent this from continuing to happen and taking more lives. If action is taken, lives can be saved; therefore there must be something that we can and should do to help. Below is another ad from the same ad campaign. In my opinion, these two ads are equally creative and effective.