Rhetorical Analysis Of Reebok Commercials

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the methods of persuasion that are used in this commercial, and how the use of ethos, pathos, and logos has made the commercial from ASPCA persuasive and successful.

Logos, ethos, and pathos are essential components used in advertising. By learning to recognize logos, ethos, and pathos in advertising, we are able to understand the message and what is being portrayed. (Albert et al, 2014), suggested that Aristotle postulated that a speaker’s ability to effectively convince an audience is constructed on how well the speaker appeals to that audience in three different areas: logos, ethos, and pathos. These appeals together form what Aristotle calls a rhetorical triangle.

What captures the attention of people when they view an advertisement, commercial or poster? Is it the colors, a captivating phrase or the people pictured? While these are some of the elements often employed in advertising, we can look deeper and analyze the types of appeals that are utilized to draw attention to certain advertisements. The persuasive methods used can be classified into three modes. These modes are pathos, logos, and ethos. Pathos makes an appeal to emotions, logos appeals to logic or reason and ethos makes an appeal of character or credibility. Each appeal can give support to the message that is being promoted.

Logos, pathos, and ethos are three Greek, ancient rhetorical arguments that are used frequently in today’s society. Advertisement are common used methods to persuade their potential customers to buy or support their product or idea. For example, skincare companies use proven facts to convince their customers that if they use their product, then their skin will look younger or feel younger; this is a form of logos, a term that refers to the use of logic and reason to support one's ideas. Instead of using facts to persuade people, pathos relies on appealing to a person's emotion. An example for pathos is NASAP, the animal rescue program. They intentionally show emotional images that are designed to elicit an emotion from the viewers; their use

To me, this commercial wasn’t just an advertisement. It was something that moved me. It explained the feelings I have towards athletics and put them into words. It was something I related to because I felt like I was talking to my future child.

In most commercials, with the little time span they have, they must display their product, they usually try to persuade the viewer to either donate, buy or switch. In these commercials on tv, they use rhetoric appeals to do so and try to keep the viewers’ attention, same with these two mobile companies. While both use all the persuasive strategies, At&T connects through pathos and logos while Sprint relays on ethos and logos. They use these rhetorical appeals differently to keep the viewer wanting to learn more and potentially change to their product. Rhetorical appeals are used in both commercials, but one effectively uses these persuasive strategies to convince the viewer to switch to their network.

The Star Wars commercial is Ethos because Darth Vader uses his position as lord to convince people in going to the darkside. THe SPCA Rescue The Animals commercial uses Pathos because it's using your emotions to persuade you into helping the animals by spending money to the company.

Persuasion is the most important aspect of advertising. The elements used to persuade audiences are known as ethos, logos, and pathos. Ethos establishes credibility or authority, pathos evokes emotions, and logos appeals to logic. In advertising, pathos is the most common appeal. The advertisement selected for this analysis is designed to target smokers through the use of ethos, pathos, and logos. In the Quit.org commercial, pathos is the most present of the three appeals. The effectiveness of this advertisement stands out because of its concern for the well-being of all viewers, especially smokers, and its reliance on emotional reciprocation between those in the commercial and its viewers.

Advertising is something we see throughout our lives, sometimes without even knowing it. The issue is that some are so small that we don’t even know we’re being told what to buy. Simple placement of branding in our favorite movies and tv shows gives us a bias for that product already. Companies know how to use many rhetorical devices to play towards our emotions and thought processes to make us more apt to try their specific product over the competitor. Sometimes, the devices used in ads are so small and hidden that we do not even see them, but they still affect the way we think and even see some things. Through logos, pathos, and ethos, advertisements change the way we think and feel about their products.

Between these two advertisements, the spoof ad makes a much stronger argument than the Nike advertisement. The spoof ad has a powerful message that emotionally touches people. It is a message that many people did not even know about. In contrast, the Nike advertisement

Advertisements implement different strategies in order to persuade the viewers using ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos is appealing to the viewers character. Pathos is the way something provokes an emotion. Logos is using numbers and reasoning to persuade an audience. In the anti smoking campaign ads, the creators test the effectiveness of the ads by appealing to the audience using pathos in two different types of ways.

That exhilarating feeling we get when we watch these car commercials. They make us feel rich, powerful, and successful whenever we buy these cars. It’s engraved in our minds that this is what American dreams are all about. They use many mind-sensing appeals to get you to buy their products. They really make us feel that we are testing their product out. Many beer companies can get the consumer by displaying sex appeals. They put half naked women in their ads to get the audience 's immediate attention. It really makes the consumer feel like they will have “hot women” to talk to when they consume their products. Companies can also use emotional appeals as well, such as showing skinny, deprived, hungry children in TV commercials. They reach out into our minds and make us feel that we should have a heart for these poor children. This is a positive way to persuade people to donate money to those who are in dire need of help.

To understand how advertisers attempt to influence audiences to promote a certain idea or purchase a specific item, an explanation of the rhetorical devices used would be helpful. For that reason, the emotional appeal, pathos, focuses on invoking an audiences’ emotions using elements such as humor, sympathy, hatred, or fear (Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz 28). In addition, ethos, the character appeal, intends to persuade an audience by establishing authority and credibility (Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz 40). While there are more rhetorical devices, ethos and pathos are the two that are prevalent in both advertisement videos. Both seem to attempt to gain trust and invoke the audience to partake in a specific action.

Known as the language of persuasion, advertisements have been speaking to us consumers for as long as anyone can remember. We are constantly being bombarded by big corporations to buy their products and services. No medium is left untouched; television, social media, radio, billboards, and even other people are used as vehicles for messages a given company is trying to reinforce. With the advent of technology, it has become increasingly difficult for companies to stand out to consumers in an impactful fashion. Apple Computer managed to do just that with their ‘Get a Mac’ campaign that launched in 2006; these 62 advertisements used a combination of humor, ethos, pathos, and logos to sell upscale computers to the market at an alarmingly

An American entertainer, Will Rogers, once said, “Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they do not have for something they do not need” (Web). This is the power of the advertisement; it has a power to persuade people even though it might not be on their shopping list. Hundreds of advertisements are put in to our brains every day of our lives, but out of those hundreds of advertisements, how many of them cross your mind when you buy something? There are different types of advertisement out there, such as television commercials and radio commercials that try to catch many minds of audiences; however, the most fascinating type of advertisement has to be the rhetoric advertisement. A rhetoric