Making "Pictures in Our Heads": Government Advertising in Canada

Abstract

[Jonathan Rose] does make abundantly clear how false is the common defence by governments that their messages only seek to inform the public. All messages are persuasive instruments that forward the state's agenda. Here Rose draws on the lessons of semiotics and rhetoric. He demonstrates that many ads use the technique of "enthymeme," an argument in which one of the key premises is missing, where the reader or viewer is expected to add what is necessary to understand the claim. So citizens supply B to make sense of the association of A and C: they are involved in the very process of persuasion. Rose argues the correct distinction is between the styles of messages employed to sell non-contentious and contentious policies. The former are more visual, using an ethical or emotional strategy, or what he calls "ethos" and "pathos"--consider many past commercials for Canada Day. The latter are devotees of "logos": they seek to reason by relying on information and argument. But the reasoning is specious, an illusion, since very often the ads utilize symbols to trigger acceptance--Rose reproduces the script of three Constitution ads to demonstrate the techniques. He does not say much about the contrast between the soft and hard sells, though, perhaps because both are more evident in the realm of the social advertising sponsored by governments to defeat drunk-driving (normally hard), smoking (both hard and soft), and racism (normally soft). Indeed, until recently, Canadian ad-makers often chose a gentle or soft approach to seducing the public, a style that did not cause offense but probably also did not have much impact.