Epideictic
Rhetoric in Advertising
Barbara
Blakely wrote an article titled iPods,
Viagra, and the Praiseworthy Life: Epideictic Rhetoric in Technology
and Medical Print Advertising which
explains a college study that was she performed in order to analyze
print ads for pharmaceutical and technological products. She
believed that they were examples of epideictic rhetoric which
encouraged people to forget what they were looking for in
advertisements by presenting a message that agrees with commonly
accepted cultural values. She also believed that the effect was much
higher when ads of this nature appeared in magazines. Epideictic
means designed to display something and rhetoric is the effective use
of language. Combined epideictic rhetoric is an effective use of
language being used to display or describe something which in this
case would be advertisements. Barbara felt that attention to
epideictic rhetoric was important for two main reasons with the first
being that audio, visual, and electronically mediated forms of
knowledge have brought on large change in the ways in which knowledge
is produced, received, and consumed and because of this, a broader
approach to education on this matter is needed. The second reason is
the inherent tension between the corporate driven media and a
democratic imperative that people intellectually and behaviorally
separate consumerism and citizenship. Cultural theorists believe
that advertising is one of the most influential sources and say that
it is able to create a common culture. Advertising for
pharmaceuticals and technology taps into a strong cultural narrative
that promotes a particular version of a better life based on
progress, convenience, efficiency, and the "cool factor."
Because of this it is important to take advertising's inherent
rhetorical nature seriously. From these ideals, Barbara created a
study of the rhetoric in print advertising for pharmaceutical and
technological products.
The
premise behind the study is that pharmaceutical and technological ads
are not only presented differently, but received with a degree of
receptivity than other ads. An important factor in the effectiveness
of these ads is the influence of people's identification with the
magazines they read regularly. Advertising placed in regularly read
magazines receives little critical processing due to the forces of
trust, identity, and authority. Advertising in magazines accounts
for nearly 48% of the magazines' content with editorial pages
accounting for the remaining 52%. Editors of magazines try to ensure
that both types of content are able to contribute to the reader
experience. The study took place in 2005, in Popular Culture
Analysis, a class offered by Barbara's English Department and set out
to discover how visual and verbal techniques are used as epideictic
rhetoric and how these techniques blur the lines between education
and promotion of products. The class contained 29 students with a
mixture of undergraduate levels and majors. The required texts for
the class were Lardner and Lundberg's Exchanges:
Reading and Writing about Consumer Culture,
Maasik and Solomon's Signs
of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers,
and Richard Robbins' Global
Problems and the Culture of Capitalism.
Several videos were viewed with the most relevant being The Media
Education Foundation's videos Rich
Media, Poor Democracy
and Representation
and the Media
as well as PBS Frontline documentaries The
Persuaders
and Merchants
of Cool.
Barbara
selected Parade and USA Weekend, two magazines with a very broad
audience, large circulation, and always carry pharmaceutical and
technology ads. General audience magazines were selected to level
out advertising that is highly audience specific because the study
wants the perceptions of students to rely on how pharmaceutical and
technological ads rely on epideictic rhetoric. Some of the questions
used to guide the study include:
What
are the specific culturally embedded and approved values associated
with pharmaceutical and technological products in print advertising?
What
role does epideictic rhetoric play in the conferring and celebration
of these values relative to these products?
How,
based on the first and second questions, do viewers perceive these
ads: as persuasive or as objectively informative messages?
Data
was collected on two separate occasions. Students were first asked
to recall one pharmaceutical ad and one technological ad they had
recently seen on TV, in print, or on the Internet. They were also
asked to choose and directly analyze two ads from Parade and USA
Weekend. Simply asking students to recall ads revealed how they
tended to perceive and remember them which provided insight into the
processing of ads through emotions rather than critic. The students
were asked to recall the ads, comment on whether each ad was
persuasive or education, and identify visual and verbal elements in
each that led to their decision. In the second collection of data
students were asked to directly analyze ads from Parade or USA
Weekend. Each student was asked to select a copy of either magazine
and find one pharmaceutical and one technology ad. They were then
asked to analyze and compare the two ads' use of visual and verbal
epideictic rhetoric to promote underlying values that the reader is
supposed to identify with.
Both
collections revealed that ad makers implicitly praise common
conceived values. The study also shows that advertising for
pharmaceutical and technology products align ads with culturally
promoted values of happiness; efficiency, speed, and control; a lot
of free time; and "authorities" who have our best interests
at heart. Recalled and directly analyzed technology ads were found
to be purely promotional whereas recalled and analyzed pharmaceutical
ads were found to be primarily educational because they used medical
words, compared their product to another brand, advised to talk to a
health care professional, and used consumers as advertisers. Barbara
thinks that by providing people with the means to analyze
advertisements in a deliberate and systematic way, people will become
more aware of the influence of epideictic rhetoric and its
problematic ability to blur what is educational and what is merely
persuasion. I feel that it is important for people to have a better
understanding of the ideas behind advertising. It is important to do
a little research and have a better understanding about what it is
you are about to purchase not only to know if it works, but to know
if it is safe. Like my mother always told me, “You can't believe
everything you hear,” or in this case read.
References
Blakely,
B. J. (2005). iPods,
Viagra, and the Praiseworthy Life: Epideictic Rhetoric in
Dictionary.com.
(n.d.). Rhetoric.
Retrieved March 4, 2012 from
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/rhetoric.
Thefreedictionary.com.
(n.d.). Epideictic.
Retrieved March 4, 2012 from
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/epideictic.
