A Rhetorical Analysis Of Camel Cigarettes

The advertisement I chose for this assignment is a Camel cigarette advertisement from the 1950s. The top half of the advertisement depicts an older male doctor smoking a Camel cigarette. The caption for the top half of the image uses rhetorical strategies to convince the viewer to purchase Camel cigarettes. The author of this advertisement uses different text sizes and effects to highlight what is important in the advertisement. For example the words, “More”, “Doctors”, and “Camels” are not only in a large font size and all caps, but the first letter of each word is in red. This draws the reader to those words, allowing the reader to begin to associate doctors with Camels signature cigarettes. Which, in turn, gets people to trust Camels similarly to how they would trust doctors. At the top left of the advertisement the author uses ethos to describe the type of person who smokes Camel products. “The doctor is a scientist, a diplomat, and a friendly sympathetic human being all in one…” Because the doctor is described as being a good example, people will be more likely to purchase the cigarettes because such a trusted member of

During this time period, anti-tobacco activists were just starting to make claims that cigarettes were bad for your health and because older people were already hooked on the products, the cigarette companies needed to convince the new smokers to either start or to continue smoking. Therefore they used a member of society who everyone listens to and trust for health advice, a doctor, to persuade readers to start smoking Camel cigarettes. I believe that this advertisement does successfully appeal to the audience because if what is stopping people from buying cigarettes is the health risks, then the doctors endorsing the product eliminates that risk. Since Camel is also the brand most trusted by doctors, the audience is more likely to purchase from that brand over