Rhetoric Analysis of WWF Tiger Ad

Visualize yourself flipping through a magazine when you stumble upon the image of a young girl dressed in tiger clothing alone in the middle of a jungle. Her crouched and oblivious stance portrays the innocent disposition of a young tiger unaware of the dangers that she may encounter. In the foreground a shiny silver gun is positioned in the hands of someone waiting for their moment. The scene appears dark and dreary for those of us aware that this young tiger is in danger, but to her it just seems like home. The point of view for this ad makes it appear as if you, the observer, are holding the gun. While at the bottom of the ad you see the familiar WWF logo and a simple, thought provoking, statement…“Imagine this is yours”.

According to worldwildlife.org the main goal of the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) is to “conserve nature and reduce the most pressing threats to the diversity of life on Earth... Our vision is to build a future in which people live in harmony with nature,” and with ads like this they can be sure to attract your attention, but is this ad really effective? I do not think so. The sense of family and right and wrong do a phenomenal job of generating a response from its viewers, but however shocking and attention grabbing it may be aspects of it are lacking.

Pathos is the main appeal used in this advertisement, giving the observer a feeling of guilt as if he/she was in on the killing of the innocent child, in the lower right hand corner the panda atop the “WWF” letters contains ethos for some people because the World Wildlife Fund is a very popular well recognized organization; however, I feel that the advertisement is lacking in both ethos and logos because while it does a great job of attracting attention it does ...

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...ters. In this case, the ad is not drawing people’s attention to a cause but rather creating unnecessary hostility between audiences and an organization with seemingly good intentions. This ultimately makes the logic behind the point of reference weak.

. Despite the tremendous pathetic appeals in the WWF tiger ad, the lack of solid ethos and logos makes for an ineffective advertisement overall. Rather than creating an advertisement that would provoke people to learn more about WWF or donate their money to the cause, they created an advertisement with so much shock value that the audience may not be able to recognize the real message. The strong sense of emotions this ad invokes came at the cost of its ethos and logos. What may be beneficial in one aspect of an effective advertisement may hurt another ultimately making the ad ineffective at portraying its message.