Seeing the visual in argumentation: a rhetorical analysis of UNICEF Belgium's Smurf public service announcement.

• Author: Hatfield, Katherine L.
• Position: Essay

In the fall of 2005, the United Nations Children's Fund, better known as UNICEF, took a different approach to pleading for donations. They created a public service announcement (PSA) illustrating the horrors of war by using ... Smurfs. This PSA was used in an effort to raise $150,000 to assist former child soldiers in Burundi, Congo, and Sudan ("FAQ," 2005; Rennie, 2005).

Philippe Henon, press officer for Belgium UNICEF, explains that "traditional images of suffering in Third World war zones had lost their power to move television viewers" (Rennie, 2005, [paragraph] 3):

The public's resistance to the more traditional advertising campaigns can be explained by the fact that people have gotten "used" to seeing traditional images of children in despair in (mostly) African countries. Those images are broadcasted or published almost daily and people are no longer "surprised" by seeing them and most certainly don't see them as a call for action. (P. Henon, personal communication, January 6, 2006)

Essentially, viewers experience fatigue. After being exposed to the images so often, they become disinterested and no longer engage actively with them. UNICEF chose to stray from its typical modus operandi, which captures childhood innocence by presenting real life images of carefree children (Spongenberg, 2005). But UNICEF felt that a more aggressive approach was necessary. In an attempt to shock viewers into action, it deployed our childhood cartoon friends: the Smurfs.

The 30-second spot aired from the fall of 2005 until April 2006. Although the cartoon's typical audience consists almost entirely of young children, Belgian television networks ran the spot only after 9:00 p.m. so as to minimize viewership by younger audiences. International agencies like UNICEF seldom choose cartoon characters to convey their message. Instead, they emphasize the realism of human suffering. This drastic departure invites us to ask what UNICEF's Smurf PSA can teach us about reaching desensitized audiences.

Because this is a public service announcement, it is appropriate to draw our critical perspective from concepts relevant to the study of visual argument. J. Anthony Blair's (1996) perspective offers a focused lens with which to examine the Smurf PSA as a form of visual argumentation. To understand better how the spot functions, we first will survey the literature and outline Blair's theory of visual argument. Second, we will employ Blair's perspective in order to investigate the UNICEF PSA as a visual argument. Finally, we will offer several critical implications of this study.

VISUAL RHETORIC AND THE CASE FOR VISUAL ARGUMENTS

Rhetorical scholarship provides a space in which we are invited to investigate and grapple with the communicative phenomena that surround us. Ivie (1995) contends that rhetorical scholarship has social relevance and produces knowledge about our lives. He writes that criticism

reveals and evaluates the symbols that organize our lives within particular situations and that constitute the civic substance motivating political action. It is a form of advocacy that is grounded in the language of a particular rhetorical situation, its critique guided by the language of and about rhetorical theory. (p. 138)

Although Ivie is correct, we believe that scholars need to continue to explore the intersections of theory and rhetorical phenomena, especially those intersections that are visual in nature.

In the latter half of the 1990s, scholars began a major effort to examine the role of the visual in argumentation (Birdsell & Goarke, 1996; Blair, 1996; Cameron, 1996; Fleming, 1996; LaWare, 1998). LaWare (1998) suggests that this effort can be attributed to the "visual orientation of contemporary society and the richness and complexity of visual images" (p. 140). Birdsell and Goarke (1996) argue that, because they are trained to focus on verbal forms, "students of argumentation emerge without the tools needed for proficiency in assessing visual modes of reasoning and persuasion" (p. 1). Foss (2004) notes: "Throughout rhetoric's long tradition, discursive constructs and theories have enjoyed ideological hegemony, delimiting the territory of study to linguistic artifacts, suggesting that visual symbols are insignificant or inferior, and largely ignoring the impacts of the visual in our world" (p. 303). Visual symbols are pervasive, and our ignorance of them inhibits understanding of much of the world around us.

Some may argue against including the visual in argumentation theory (Fleming, 1996), generally based on two claims: (1) visual images are inherently ambiguous; and (2) arguments must be propositional (Blair, 1996, 2004; Foss, 2004). Blair (1996), however, suggests that visual arguments fit nicely within traditional rhetorical paradigms and responds to both of these claims.

First, Blair (1996) endorses O'Keefe's (1982) approach, in which an argument need not actually be expressed in language but potentially could be expressed in language. Blair notes that an argument must possess a claim and reason(s) for the claim, the claim and reasons should be "linguistically explicable and overtly expressed," and there should be "an attempt to communicate the claim and reason(s)" (p. 24). We agree that these characteristics constitute an argument.

Second, O'Keefe (1982) asserts, and Blair (1996) agrees, that an argument must be propositional. Arguments...