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Due to technological advances, advertisers are able to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. Studies have shown that people in this technology era are typically exposed to at least 250 advisements per day; hours and hours of material are shoved down our throats and lay in our unconscious brain. With as many as 250 ads seen per day of different material being thrown at us, the attempt to persuade the viewer is very much active in all types of advertisement.
I’ve taken it upon myself to review two ommercial ads and explain how they attempt to persuade the viewer to purchase the product, how they attempt to mislead the viewer, and if any fallacies are present. For my first commercial I decided to use an Axe commercial. In this commercial we have a man on a beach that decides to take a shower. The shower gel that this man decides to use is Axe shower gel; keeping in mind the logo is visibly seen. While he is showering women from all sides of the beach immediately start to mimic his movements and are somehow drown to move towards him.
As he begins to wash his back, the women begin to take off their bikini tops. It is the perfect example of a persuasive commercial. The problem with this ad is that the arguments present are not logical. Even in a case were immediately after a man uses axe body wash while showing, and women were somehow drawn to him, still proves nothing. To say because of this product women will somehow start taking their tops off and somehow be drawn to you is the common fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc (literally, “after this therefore because ofthis. ) Women can very well be drawn to you that ery day because you shaved, or maybe after your showered and smell a whole lot better than before, or maybe the women around you were feeling slightly more promiscuous that day. So accentually this body wash may not be what is drawing the women. This ad’s main goal is to get you to purchase their body wash, if you do not use this product, women will not be drawn to you, and if women are not drawn to you, they wont want to take off their clothes.
This is another type of fallacy called the Slippery Slope. With this common fallacy, Axe tries to ersuade you as the viewer to buy the product or else this and that will happen. This ad promises women, by the use of their product, it is very much implied in their illogical argument that this product will get you girls. Which I have stated before, may not be the case and can definitely mislead the viewer. The next commercial I decided to discuss was the 2014 Chevy commercial: Maddie.
This commercial also had a specific target audience as do many ads and was specifically directed to people who are looking into buying a car, and also loves animals. This commercial begins with a girl kissing her dog from hen onwards the ad begins to show several clips of this girl and her dog, going through ups and downs in her life. At the end of the commercial we see that the girl has grown up and gotten married. We then see her daughter getting a new puppy and they all head towards a 2014 Chevy and the words “A best friend for life’s journey’ pop up.
The first thing I noticed was this commercial made all dog lovers around the world go This is common fallacy called ad populum: appealing to the emotions of the crowd. This is a fallacy because it appeals heavily to the emotions of the watcher. The ommercial contains absolutely no information about the car’s statistical data regression. Rather, it explicitly relies on the idea that the viewer will be swayed to buy the Chevy due to the sake of sentimentality and familiarity.
The message that this ad is trying to convey is, put your trust in Chevy by purchasing a Chevy make car, as they will take care of what you love most i. e. your dog. This of course can be misleading to the viewer because the make of the car does not guarantee safety in any way. In summary advisements can be very misleading, just by seeing these two examples of advisements one an see that there are usually many different types of fallacies embedded in the commercial; all while trying to persuade the viewer to buy the product.
Although we are not able to stop ourselves from viewing these ads, what we do have control over is our minds. We have the ability to educate ourselves of the types of fallacies, and with that knowledge on fallacies we can use it to identify what ad isjust trying to persuade us and what ad is trying to inform.