Ad Analysis: The Truth About Cocaine

Persuasion is used by many businesses, companies, and governments to lean people certain ways. The most common types of persuasion in ads are ethos, pathos, and logos. In a recent ad about cocaine that I found on the Ads of the World website showed examples of ethos and pathos but no logos.

The Colombian government used a few ethos in the ad. Most ads use celebrities or major reliable companies to endorse their ads as their ethos, but the makers of this ad wanted to put a negative effect on the selected audiences. In the center of the photo of the ad is a well-dressed man with the face of a giant nose showing that he is wealthy and is a cocaine user. The man is also holding a gun giving a sense of fear to the viewers of the ad. The gun gives the viewers an impression that since he is snorting coke, then he is funding the kidnappings, which implies that he may as well have been a kidnapper. The fact that he is a rich party person that funds kidnappings gives the targeted audiences a negative impression on cocaine use. The text in the top left of the ad "Cocaine helps you stay up all night when you're clubbing. It also helps finance terrorist kidnappings..." helps to make viewer want to stay away from cocaine and to keep from being like the man in the ad.

The fact that cocaine users are funding terrorist kidnappings makes the users feel guilty. This is the government using pathos in their ad to give an emotional effect on their audiences. The visual picture of the helpless girl in the closet with the wealthy cocaine user guarding the door with a gun puts a fear on parents about their children being kidnapped. The gun really sticks out to me because I have always thought of a gun as being an object that strikes fear. This ad makes a very good point that Colombians do not want their country destroyed by cocaine. The statement "Cocaine doesn't destroy people, it destroys a country" in the top left side of the ad also strikes fear into the viewer of their country being destroyed.

While studying this ad, I noticed that the ad designer did not put logos in the ad. I started to realize that cocaine users do not care about research that has been done on the use of cocaine, they already know that cocaine is bad for them. So the studies would not persuade a person to quit snorting cocaine. Also if people used logic to decide to snort cocaine or not, they would have never started using cocaine in the first place. Visual pictures have more of an effect on people than reading research. The makers of this ad made a good decision by not using logos in this ad.

The Kaziranga Defender

In this photo a defender of Kaziranga is bathing before the start of a long day. My first impression of the man was not that he was bathing, I first thought that he was just washing off his feet to keep from tracking dirt into his house. When I realized that he was actually taking a bath, I also realized the poverty in other countries and how many Americans like myself take advantage of our wealth.

When I first started to really study the picture I notice a bar of soap in the man's left hand. If I am just washing off my feet to keep from tracking in dirt, I do not use soap. I just rinse my feet off with a water hose and shower inside my house later. His entire body is wet giving an obvious sign that this man is doing more in the photo than just rinsing his feet.

Most people that I know use a water hose at their house. This man has filled a bucket with water that he got from an old fashioned water pump and uses a cup to pour the water onto his body. Since the water is coming from an old water pump, I doubt that the water is heated. I tried to figure out if my thought on the temperature of the water was correct and scrolled down to the bottom of the picture to find out if there was any text below the picture. The caption below the photo said that the man was in fact using a bucket of cold well water. The water that I use to take a bath is not cold. Like most Americans, I have a hot water heater that gives me the luxury of soaking in hot water.

Shown by the way the man is bathing outside with cold water from a bucket, the Kaziranga defender obviously lives in a life of poverty. The caption below the photograph of this man says that he and other guards like him seldom complain about lack of conveniences. Americans are not the same way. We take advantage of every hot shower we take and do not even think about other people not able to take a nice shower. Analyzing this photo was a real eye opener for me on the poverty of others.