Tasks
● Your purpose analysis should explain - in detail - at least 3 strategies that work towards selling the product in the advertisement, and this explanation should describe how any strategies you articulate are particular types of rhetorical appeals (to logos, pathos, or ethos). Note: As you are looking for strategies remember to look at things like images and colors used along with explicit text messages.
● In addition to explaining your strategies and how they work, you should also make a judgment about which strategy is most successful and describe why.
● Your project should include a primary insight that makes a judgment about how successful the strategies are - overall - in working to achieve the purpose in the advertisement.
● Your project is written for an audience and should be written with an audience in mind: it should be organized in such a way that readers can follow your thinking from paragraph to paragraph and within each paragraph. This organization should lead your reader to your primary insight in a clear manner; in other words, your primary insight should help structure your project.
● Since you are writing for a website (your ePortfolio site), you should include and integrate at least one multimodal element. You could include pictures, sounds, or even hyperlinks to other websites; but you must make sure that your reader understands why you are including these elements. Consider what media might reinforce your primary insight, capture the purpose, and/or appeal to your readers in another way. For this project, you probably should include an image of the advertisement under discussion (if possible). Just do not forget to explicitly refer to that element and explain it to your readers.
● Your project should be approximately 500-1000 words in length
ASPCA (The American Society Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) is a non-profit organization founded in 1979 with hopes to help fight cruelty and make a life changing difference for animals across America. They use pathos in their strategic emotional advertisements on television in order to get people to donate to their cause, along with other rhetorical elements such as kairos, and logos.
One of the strategies this company uses is urgency. At the end of the advertisement, you hear the narrator say things like “act now” and “don't wait”. This is designed to make you act fast so you can save the animals, also known as “kairos” or opportune timing. This is also an emotional tactic (pathos) they are using to get your business because they show heart wrenching photos and videos of abused animals, designed to make you sad so you feel morally obligated to donate and save them. They get you by adding urgency to these emotional advertisements, making you feel like a horrible person if you don't donate immediately, almost like it would be your fault that animals are being abused, even if you aren’t hurting or neglecting any animals yourself. They propose that the longer you go on not donating, the more the animals will be neglected and abused, pressuring you to comply, from a moral standpoint.
Click below to watch the full ASPCA advertisement.
We all know these ads from the notorious beginning to the song “In The Arms Of The Angel” played over sad-looking neglected animals. The use of such a sad song with soft piano strikes the tear-jerker nerve and makes you want to cry. They want to make you feel those emotions for these animals, because they want you to donate. They have strategically placed this song in these ads to further make things depressing. If they hadn’t put this music here, it wouldn’t nearly be as effective in making you cry, don't act like you’ve never cried over these advertisements, I know you have. They aren’t evil for making you sad, it is just a tactic they use to get you to make an emotion-based decision. If they didn’t try so hard to make you feel sad, then less people would even consider donating to the cause, because they wouldn’t feel emotionally charged or obligated to do so.
The narration by the soft-toned woman speaking in the background really adds to the overall tone of the advertisement. She sounds sad and worried for the animals, making you more likely to pick up on the tone and purpose of the overall advertisement. She says things like “every day, animals are beaten and abused” in a desperate tone. Non-specific statistics are used in these ads to inform you of the realities of animal cruelty, a form of logos. Logos is the logic and reason driven parts used in communications. By seeing the reasoning behind why this organization is so passionate about helping abused animals, you are more likely to donate, because you understand and acknowledge the logic behind it.
To further urge you to donate and save an animal, ASPCA mentions that they will send you a picture of the animal you helped and a tote bag for free. This is commonly known as an incentive; something to motivate you to do or purchase something. As if helping animals isn't enough of an incentive. Furthermore, if someone receives this tote bag, it doubles as a brand showcase. Using this bag in public will gather the attention of other animal lovers willing to donate to the same cause.
By far, the most effective strategy used in this advertisement is pathos, or using emotion or fear-based arguments for the purpose of those who see it to donate, based on their empathy for the abused animals. Overall, this advertisement is effective in gaining support and donations through airing on television, or before videos on social media. I hated seeing these ads as a kid because they would always make me cry, which is exactly what the goal was to get people to donate to this cause.
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