Classical Rhetoric and Storytelling in Advertising Praxis

Abstract

Based on the observation that storytelling has acquired a new centrality in the advertising strategies, which success can be explained by the growing importance on the brand communication in prejudice of the product’s unidirectional advertisement (Baynast & Lendrevie, 2014; Baynast et al., 2018; Kotler & Keller, 2015; Rossiter et al. 2018); by the effect of the technological evolution, which allowed that the advertisement videos stop having the television exclusivity and started to be available in internet video channels, such as YouTube (Cardoso et al., 2017; Laurence, 2018; Zamudio, 2016); and for living in a hedonic society, which privileges the emotions and sensory gratifications, and, simultaneous, elect the ordinary citizen as leading figure (Escalada, 2016; Laurence, 2018; Rossiteret al., 2018); this text pretends to point the communicational wealth of storytelling in advertising, that has in the classical rhetoric some of the scientific bias on which it is based, can be established via: (a) the history verisimilitude, that comes for being sustained in the quotidian narrative, with content of “human value” and with resource to real “people” (Ballester & Sabiote, 2016; Escalada, 2016; Laurence, 2018; Panarese & Villegas, 2018); (b) evidence of the pathos, which comes mainly from the emotions that the history generates in the audience (Ballester & Sabiote, 2016; Laurence, 2018; Panarese & Villegas, 2018; Salmon, 2016); (c) the relevance of the ethos, which comes from the reliability of the author/credibility of the brand (Laurence, 2018; Panarese & Villegas, 2018).