War Posters and Propaganda

During the First World War, graphic posters played a very important role for promoting war propaganda as an easy and effective form of medium. War posters provided various messages with pictures to exhort people to share in the war effort. They could affect people's way of thinking both consciously and unconsciously. In commercial advertisement, the hierarchy of effects which make consumers buy products or services is abstracted in AIDAS (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action, Satisfaction) and it is theoretically applicable to propaganda by war posters. Therefore, in order to analyze the process of how these posters worked as a propaganda medium, I will employ the AICAS-Model. Through demonstration of a variety of different procedures used by national war posters to convince the reader, the AICAS-Model is able to summarize the effects of the propaganda. In this paper, I will illustrate how each poster differs in its method of delivering war propaganda, using those made in France, UK, US, Italy, Russia, Canada and Germany