Epideictic Rhetoric in Advertising

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:

1. What are the specific culturally embedded and approved values associated with pharmaceutical and technological products in print advertising?
2. What role does epideictic rhetoric play in the conferring and celebration of these values relative to these products?
3. 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

Technology and Medical Print Advertising. Retrieved February 23, 2012 from http://0-journals.ohiolink.edu.olink...4_ivatplitampa.

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.