DoctorOpossum2504
Essay required must be 1500-1700 words (3 – 3 ½ Pages) After…
Essay required must be 1500-1700 words (3 – 3 ½ Pages)
After working at Super-Duper Creative Advertising for five years, your big chance has finally arrived: if you can demonstrate a superior knowledge of the rhetoric of advertising, you will be promoted to junior executive. In three weeks the advertisement you have been working on for six months (briefly halt the hypothetical narrative of the prompt and insert the magazine advertisement you have chosen for the assignment) will be evaluated by your boss. Along with the advertisement itself (this means you need to submit a copy of the ad with your final essay), your boss has requested to see an analysis/explanation of the rhetorical plan you used to generate it. Your boss doesn’t want a laundry list of strategies, but instead a cohesive, unified, thesis-driven essay explaining the principal rhetorical strategies of the ad.
Your boss has suggested an approach: explain how the three Aristotelian appeals (ethos, pathos, logos) and a narrative (or narratives) or a meta-narrative (or meta-narratives) function in the ad. Your boss also wants you to address the significance of the ad’s target audience, a process that will help you narrow your focus and zero in on the specifics of your rhetorical design. You should also seek to anticipate your boss’s potential responses, and attempt an analytical approach that demonstrates both your expertise and professionalism.
Important considerations:
As stated in the prompt, this assignment asks you to play pretend: work within the hypothetical situation of the assignment and write from the perspective of the creator of the advertisement. As the “creator” of the ad, you should be able to explain the rhetorical strategies, as established in the prompt, that “you” used to put it together. For an essay assignment such as this, it is acceptable to use first-person pronouns (“My goal in placing the image of . . . ,” or “Knowing that parents want to make sure that their children are safe, I connect the . . . ,” or “I chose a brown background for the purpose of . . . “) to deliver your material.
To be clear, an advertisement is a text meant to sell/promote a product (Dove soap, Toyota automobiles, Coach purses, Adidas shoes, Tide detergent, Hilton resorts, and so on) or promote an organization/cause (Boys and Girls Clubs of America, SPCA, ACLU, and so on). For this assignment, make sure to analyze a magazine ad and not a magazine article, which is the material that is produced by the publication itself.
Choose an ad for the assignment that is fairly rhetorically sophisticated and that has more than one layer to it. In other words, since it would prove difficult to sustain three pages of analytical coverage on an ad for Oreo cookies that presents an Oreo being dunked in a glass of milk, it is probably a good idea to avoid choosing such an ad.
If you do not have many magazines available to you, search for an ad via Google. Just make certain to choose a magazine ad (one that was originally published in a magazine). You should also make certain that the ad is real (as I’m sure you are aware, there are a lot of ad parodies and ad memes floating around on the internet; for this assignment, it would not be a good look to conduct earnest analysis on a fake ad).
Your essay should be delivered in your own analytical voice from start to finish; please refrain from incorporating outside sources into your essay.
