Docu-advertising. The role of “pathos” in Documentary Advertising Storytelling

Abstract

Growing intolerance towards traditional advertising and the demand for authenticity in communication and marketing offerings have, in the last decade, led consumers to privilegeforms of promotional communication content of a less spectacular and more informative nature, which is also integrated with the programming of the media, instead of inserted parasitically into it. Hence the choice of some companies to produce branded contents aimed at the narration of reality, and in a documentary style. The initial hypothesis is that beyond the most objective and informative narrative elements (as in the Aristotelian rhetorical strategy of logos), an emotive discourse (pathos) is constructed to communicate a socially engaged brand image (ethos), socially committed to its target. Thus the brand is proposed as an authority, or at least as a reference, in an area of interest to its potential consumers, who will identify more easily with it.