The Place of Advertising in Persuasion

Abstract

In Rhetoric, Aristotle states that there are as many types of speech as classes of listeners, establishing that they are only three but the appearance of a new agent, an audiovisual and interactive medium, able to overcome the contingency of both the orator’s and the auditorium’s impossibility to share the same physical space, as well as the existence of new classes of listeners – or new profiles of consumers, attending to Advertising’s specific language – are transforming the relationship between these two elements of classic Rhetoric, allowing the transmission of images capable to change the classic speeches but also the character of the listener. With this paper, our goal is to accomplish an improvement of the Aristotelian rhetorical model, motivated by the perception of audiovisual and interactive media’s strong intervention in the definition of the contemporary persuasive speeches, among which is the advertising discourse.