Saturday, November 6, 2010
Appeal to Fear in Advertisements
As mentioned, appeal to fear is the use of premises that would potentially strike fear into the listener and have them potentially sway towards or agree with your argument. One example that I can think of on the top of my head is the Truth commercials. Truth is an ad campaign against the use of tobacco products. Every so often they bring out and release new commercials. Generally these commercials are entertaining. More recently they have been creating commercials of a fictional food company called "Shards o Glass." In the commercial, it is a company comparable to the tobacco industry because it is harmful for the user. The Truth ad campaign would make a fake commercial for the fake company and then at the end it would give a fact about tobacco product. These facts are meant to scare the public from using tobacco products. Generally it is about death and illness, which is something people can get scared of. But I feel that it really doesn't affect the users because it is something they already know and have been told. They pose a good argument to those who have not started smoking.
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Heyy!! I totally agree with you on how the Truth commercials try to appeal to ones fear. Trust uses knowledge to scare people or to show people the truth about smoking. Their new "Shards o Glass" commercials appeals to peoples fear by letting everyone know that they are glass in their tobacco product. I also do agree with you that it doesn't really affect users because a lot of people who smoke cigarettes already know all the negative effects it causes. I can use my own friends as an example because they all smoke even though they know smoking can cause many different illness and even death.
ReplyDeleteI have seen the Truth Ads before, but had not seen this particular one, so I went out to YouTube and viewed a few of these ads. The thing that struck me most was that viewers may not know who or want was being advertised until the very end of the commercial, at which time you need to recall the commercial to draw the correlation to smoking and the tobacco industry. The Truth advertisers also attempt to evoke a sense of anger directed at the tobacco industry for their blatant disregard of our health. I agree that these ads seem to appeal to fear, but do very little to actually convince smokers to quit. My grandmother died of lung cancer and had visible signs of cancer on her body towards the end of her life. You’d think this would encourage my cousin to quit, witnessing our grandmother in pain, but her justification, as with many smokers, is that it will not happen to her. Thanks for sharing this important ad!
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