Visual Rhetoric Analysis

Today's entry is going to be about the visual rhetoric in this One Life's advertisement that I found by browsing on the web.

'One Life' is an awareness campaign against HIV, created by the Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) pharmaceutical company.

Bristol-Myers Squibb/One life couch. Advertisement. Creative Ad Awards. Web. June 2009 

The intended message that this particular ad is offering is to make people be aware of the danger of practicing sexual relations with different people and without protection. It also persuades its audience to take the HIV test in order to know if they're in danger or not of suffering the disease.

Since the object of this ad aims to an adult audience, we can infer that the visual strategies that it uses include explicit material. For me, the context of the image is very convenient for the purpose of the campaign and it's pretty much effective on grabbing people's attention, which certainly happened to me. I find its use of rhetoric very straight forward, I can't think of it as subtle because of the direct content that it's utilizing. 

I believe that it's really easy for the audience to figure out the ad's intention thanks to the sentence that it is using in the image: 'Each time you sleep with someone, you also sleep with his past', which means that whenever you have relations with someone else you are also having relations with the people that that person has had relations with. All of the arms coming from the man's torso and embracing the woman make you think that this man has slept with several people and for that the woman is being in danger of getting infected of some sexually transmitted disease.