Advertising as a rhetorical meta-genre

The appearance of visual media, 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 of changing the classic speeches.
With this research, our goal is to accomplish an improvement of the Aristotelian rhetorical model, motivated by the perception of audiovisual media’s strong intervention in the definition of the contemporary persuasive speeches, among which is the increasingly sophisticated advertising speech. Consequently, our investigation is motivated, on the one hand, by the possibility of considering Advertising as a new rhetorical genre, able to widen the stability of the Aristotelian triad; and, on the other hand, by the challenge and responsibility of portraying this new genre.