Posted February 26, 2006

There are a lot of inspirational books on creating great advertising. Some of them are classics, but this one is really a classic -- it’s 2,300 years old.

Aristotle, one the great ancient Greek philosophers, studied the art of persusasion. And his work convinces me that he would have been right at home in today’s advertising agency.

His ideas are as sound today as they were two millennia ago. His basic framework was that persuasion had three attributes. These include:

Ethos:
The character and credibility of the speaker
Pathos:
Appealing to an audience’s emotions, fears, and desires
Logos:
The use of logical argument, analysis, and reasoning

To see how this all fits together, let’s consider a term life insurance company -- and how it might use Aristotle’s ideas in selling it.

We’d apply some ethos -- leveraging the insurance company’s brand attributes and what it stands for. This might embody the trust people have placed in the company for more than 100 years and its solid reputation for security and stability.

Pathos helps us frame life insurance in terms of fears and desires. We’d encourage our prospects to consider their loved ones, what could happen to them in the event of the unthinkable, and the notion of gaining valuable peace of mind.

Finally, logos offers us a chance to make a valid argument that term insurance is an excellent value. We could introduce the idea that that because rates rise as you age, it’s logical to lock in coverage sooner rather than later.

Ethos. Pathos. Logos. I hardly ever think of these words when I'm writing, but I'm always applying these concepts. And it's not just important for copy. Layout, color, typography, and imagery all bring ethos, pathos, and logos into the communication mix.

In introducing this post, I purposely didn’t tell you the title of Aristotle's book, The Art of Rhetoric, because the notion of "rhetoric" has become pejorative. You hear people talk of dismissing ideas as "mere rhetoric," as if rhetoric is only used to convey doubletalk and confusion.

But rhetoric is really the study of the art and technique of persuasion. The term comes from the Greek word rhetor, which means "orator."

Now I certainly don’t want to be accused of being 23 centuries behind the times, so let me add a fourth rhetorical construct:

Mesos:
The physical attributes of communication

I don’t know any Greek, so I used an online English-Greek translator, but I’m pretty sure that mesos refers to the communication medium.

In ancient Greece, you could write something down, but not print it. And there was probably a rudimentary form of signage. But to Aristotle, rhetoric was pretty much confined to the study of how an orator speaks to an audience, whether it be an audience of one or of many.

Today, there’s mass media --– direct mail, brochures, TV, web sites, email, and many more. Mesos introduces the idea that every medium has varying techniques and implications for persuasion.

I think Aristotle would approve. And I think he’d be successful running his own advertising agency (though by now, his agency would probably be part of Omnicom).

The only thing that might confuse him would be the term “greeking in,” which refers to the practice of placing nonsense text into a layout before the copy is written.

Somehow, I think he’d be rather insulted.