Sophia Liu Professor James Cushing English 145 10 October 2013 Print Advertisement Analysis: Lancmes Glittery Serum

Advertising in the modern age has progressed into a field that requires advanced levels of research and development. Based on its target market, an ad is formulated to suit the tastes and interests of the audience. Ultimately, its goal is to create positive impressions that influence our behavior over time to encourage us to make a purchase, either now or later. Print advertisements in magazines work in this way, offering its target market pages of compelling arguments and engaging impressions with the brand. One example is a photo-dominated advertisement for an Advanced Genifique Youth Activating Concentrate anti-aging serum by Lancme, seen on the second page of Self magazine. With its pathos, ethos, and logos modes of persuasion, this ad succeeds in appealing to the emotions of its intended audience and credibility of the company, but falls short due to subtle fallacies that provide a weak basis of logical appeal. By marketing this ad to readers of Self magazine, marketers must find a way to allure relatively affluent women who are focused on good health, fitness, and beauty. Similar to lifestyle and fitness magazines such as Shape and Womens Health, Self includes a variety of ads in each issue, ranging from make-up and perfume to exercise wear. The magazine is photo-heavy, using visuals to show fit women whose physiques serve as the ideal goal for many readers. This content follows closely to the rising cultural phenomenon in our society that focuses on body consciousness, which has resulted in a trend of increased beauty advertising throughout all forms of publications and media. The Self magazine brand is built on an active, healthy, fitness- and health-minded group

of women who are willing to spend their money investing in themselves. Value assumptions that much of this audience is self-conscious and insecure about their age and appearance provide the foundation in which specific advertising techniques are built upon. With a clear target audience in mind, Lancmes ad for its Advanced Genifique Youth Activating Concentrate anti-aging serum is designed to sentimentally appeal to the audience through pathos, using images and keywords that evoke certain reactions which aid in the value and worth of the product in the readers eyes. Assuming Self magazine readers are interested in looking youthful and affluent enough to invest in this luxury product, Lancme advertises this serum on the slogan Recapture the skin you were born to have. See it. Feel it. On the top of the ad is a small paragraph describing the product, claiming that the serum is so powerful it can reactivate 10 key signs of youth . . . revealing a more radiant and smoother skin that you can see and feel. Words such as youth, smoother skin, and multiple ethnicities and all ages exemplify the glittering generalities fallacy, emotionally appealing to a broad audience with these highly valued concepts and beliefs. However, these terms do not carry any supporting information or reason. Similarly, on the left page of the ad, readers can see a good-looking, pleasant womans face whose skin spears to be clear, fresh, and what many covetous women consider perfect. They would immediately associate this perfect skin with the product shown on the right, emotionally attracted to it based on the womans face. The bottle of serum is the focus of the right page of the ad, placed strategically on a purple background that hints at femininity, purification, and luxury. In addition, the Lancme logo, which calls attention to the high-end skin care, fragrance, and makeup name brand, is displayed in a noticeably large font, demonstrating the appeal to wealth fallacy which makes this product seem superior and better than other alternatives because its a luxury, expensive good.

Ethos also plays into the effectiveness of the ad, found in the text surrounding and describing the product. Key words such as resiliency, elasticity and radiance are seemingly technical jargon used to describe skin, earning credibility and trust from readers by appearing as a voice of knowledgeable authority. These words are chosen specifically to sound professional yet comprehensible by the general public. The percentages under these words are used to supposedly show the improvement of womens skin after 8 weeks of product use, giving the impression that the formula has been scientifically tested by experts to be engineered for the everywoman. These statistics help support the argument using the ethos form of rhetoric to connect to target consumers in an ethical appeal as a source of expert authority. Readers are assumed to agree that the numbers have actual scientific meaning. However, a closer look at the footnotes on the ad reveals that the first results in just 7 days claim was based on a self-assessment by Lancme during an 8-week study. These experts turned out to Lancmes own specialists testing their own product in clinical evaluations, embodying false authority. Whether or not these tests are biased or not is unknown, but most would likely doubt the latter. These glittery keywords lose their significance when evaluated based on logic, especially since the meanings of words like youth and improvement are highly subjective to the individual. With instant appeals of pathos and ethos playing throughout the visual and textual content of this anti-aging serum ad, Lancme depends on assumptions of the audiences background to effectively market and sell the product. Although this Advanced Genifique Youth Activating Concentrate ad impressively captures the attention and interest of Self magazine readers at first glance, its seemingly meaningful arguments are highly slippery. Persuasion is the ultimate goal of advertising, and Lancme ad does a decent job using the various techniques to make a good first impression on readers, whom they assume will not evaluate the faulty reasoning behind the claims. Many youth- and health-oriented women should be willing to invest the $102 in this serum that will to transform their skin to the radiant and soft skin they were born to have.