Rhetoric of Health

This television commercial for HeadOn (“apply directly to the forehead”) began airing in 2006. The first time I saw it, I thought it was a joke. The ad is very simple: we see a woman calmly and deliberately take a tube of some sort and rub it on her forehead. Repeated in quick succession three times is the phrase: “HeadOn. Apply directly to the forehead.” There is an arrow graphic pointing to the woman’s forehead, and the background is a simple blue with a gridline pattern over it. At the end of the short ad (it is less than 15 seconds long), we see a picture of the HeadOn product packaged, and we are informed that it is “available without a prescription at retailers nationwide.”

The intended audience of the ad is very broad. It could be tailored towards women (as a woman is featured in the ad, and the announcer’s voice is female), but there is nothing that indicates that the product cannot be used by anyone. Basically, anyone watching TV is the audience.

Though the ad is extremely simple, it is attempting to make an argument about health, though perhaps not very effectively. We get the impression that the product is used somehow to make your head feel better, but the commercial does not specify exactly what the product treats. Instead, the bulk of the ad is spent with the repetition of the phrase about applying the product directly to the forehead. The emphasis is on how to use the product, rather than what it actually does. This does not make for a very good argument about how the product will affect one’s health.

However, the ad does attempt to make a limited use of ethos. By using the gridline background and the vaguely technical sounding instructions “apply directly to the forehead” (rather than something like “rub this stuff on your head and see what happens”), the ad is attempting to present its information in a way that seems objective and scientific, and therefore more credible.

The ad makes no use of logos. It does not give the audience any reason to use the product. It gives no details about the ingredients of HeadOn, what it might help with, or how it works. For a product that is attempting to make an argument about health, not using logos can be very damaging to the argument.

The ad does employ pathos, though. Unfortunately, the main emotion that the ad causes the viewer to feel is annoyance. By repeating the same phrase three times, the audience may feel condescended, but the repetition does help to ensure that the audience remembers the name of the product and what to do with it. This is a dangerous tactic to use in an advertisement. Although the audience will remember the name of the product, they are likely to have a negative emotional association with it, and thus they are less likely to use it. The other emotion that the ad causes is confusion. By not supplying any information about HeadOn, the viewer is perhaps intrigued and wants to learn more, but he or she is certainly not convinced of HeadOn’s effectiveness.

Overall, this ad makes a very poor argument about health. It may be trying to convince its audience that HeadOn is good for their health, but it is not very successful. The ad grabs our attention, but once it has it, it fails to do anything else. It is a very entertaining viral video sensation, but not a good argument.