Özet:

Persuasion is a key element for the communication to be established with the target audience whose attitudes, opinions and behaviours are to change in a desired way in line with the specific objective through mass communication outputs. As a sub-type of the advertisements in which this kind of communication is frequently used, the public service advertisements (PSAs) draw upon various appeals in order to persuade their target audience to change their attitudes and behaviours in a desired way. The basic appeal, which the PSAs draw upon in order to call the attention of their target audience to the social issues like environmental pollution, health problems, work safety and traffic safety, is the fear appeal. Therefore, many fear appeal items such as accidents, illnesses and death are employed in the PSAs produced by many non-governmental organisations, government bodies and companies to motivate their audience to take the action against these issues as well as drawing their attention. In this scope, the purpose of this study is to present how the multimodal PSAs use the fear appeal items audio-visually and technically in the process of meaning-making. In this regard, the Traffic without Violation” campaign PSAs broadcasted on TVs in Turkey are taken into the consideration of this study through the purposive sampling method, and are examined through multimodal text analysis using Aytekin’s (2016) modelling. It is concluded from this study that the messages in the PSAs are constructed by deploying different visual, audial and technical fear appeal items as well as verbal expressions informing remorse in order to increase the persuasion level of PSAs. This study also comes with a conclusion that the fear appeals are mostly used in the visual and audial modes of the PSAs. 

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