Skip to main content

Buzzed


I was riding home in the car with my mom the other day when a commercial came on the radio. It was about two girls who had just left a club and were heading to a different club. It was clear from their voices that they had been drinking. All of a sudden there was a loud crash and the sounds of breaking glass and car alarms. They had gotten into an accident and the driver keeps apologizing saying, “I thought I was fine to drive: I was only buzzed.”

To this the passenger, who had broken her arm in the accident, responded saying, “Oh, you were only buzzed? Well that makes it all better.” And she snapped her arm back into place.

“Really?” the driver responded, “You’re really ok?”

“No that doesn’t fix anything!” she replied and cried out again as her arm snapped back.

 After which an announcer said, “Buzzed driving is drunk driving,” and the commercial ended.

This was trying to prevent people from getting buzzed and then driving. It used an appeal to fear to try to persuade the audience. Since the scenario could potentially happen, it makes the ad even scarier. The point behind it was good but it could be argued that they used the ad baculum (appeal to fear) fallacy and thus voids the argument. But for someone who doesn’t realize this potential fallacy it is most definitely persuasive. Fear can be used very effectively and I think that this commercial did a good job and using the fear to persuade people. The part where the passenger ‘unbreaks’ her arm is stretching it but the underlining point is still there and the message was very clear.

“Drinking and driving is dangerous, even if you are just buzzed.”

Labels:

Comments

  1. JeremiahJanuary 23, 2015 at 7:05 AM

    1st comment!! I think that although this commercial is outrageous, the possibility of the general situation happening is real enough to scare people. I know it definitely scared me

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownJanuary 23, 2015 at 7:51 AM

    I think it was smart to use fear in the commercial. But it was more scary that the passenger unbroke the arm... I won't drive while I'm drunk.

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownJanuary 30, 2015 at 11:37 AM

    That's a really scary commercial. I will never drink and drive.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Abigail OverbeyFebruary 2, 2015 at 6:36 AM

    This commercial is pretty dumb (like a lot of commercials) but driving buzzed is never a good idea. Don’t drink and drive kids.

    David

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open Happiness

While at the movie theaters to see The Maze Runner , I saw a commercial that featured rhetoric. The commercial begins with a young woman named Jess purchasing two Coca Cola drinks in a convenience store. One has her own name on it, and one has the name of her friend Alisha on it. The cashier watches her forlornly as she leaves, hinting that he has a crush on his customer. Jess gives the Coke with Alisha’s name on it to her friend, and together the two friends drink them. Later, Jess, Alisha and two other friends come back into the store to buy more Coke, then leave and have a good time together. Jess keeps coming back to the store with more and more friends, each time purchasing Coca Cola with their names printed on the labels. The cashier smiles and watches, but it is clear that he wishes he was with Jess.  Finally, as the cashier is closing the store for the night, Jess shows up at the door with a Coke that has the name Chris on it. She smiles and hands the drink to the ...
4 comments
Read more

Marilyn Monroe's Shampoo

While browsing on Google I found an old advertisement.  The ad was for Lustre-Crème Shampoo. It featured Marilyn Monroe, known for her beauteous looks and her parts in different movies. One of her movies was Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Lustre-Crème was attempting to sell their shampoo through the use of fallacies. By saying that Marilyn Monroe that tells you nothing about the actual product: it simply attracts you to the pretty face in the picture. Using this as an argument of why someone should buy your product is quite illogical. Just because Marilyn Monroe uses it doesn’t provide assurance of its abilities. They attempt using snob appeal by trying to make the audience believe that they could be like Marilyn Monroe if they use the same product as her. They use appeal to illegitimate authority by using Marilyn Monroe to promote their product. Although she herself is a customer, this is still rather irrelevant. She herself has no type of expertise in hair products and knows nothing t...
3 comments
Read more

Is Hip Hop a Cancer or a Cure?

The speech I watched was a Ted Talk presented by one of my favorite music artists, who just so happens to be a Christian rapper.  This rapper’s name is Lecrae Moore, but he just goes by Lecrae.  Over the past five years or so, Lecrae has been able to break out of the small box that Christian music and Christian rap have been put in, and he has been able to get his music out to all types of crowds.  So I was actually pretty excited when I saw that he had spoken at a Ted Talk in Nashville.  The speech he delivered was titled, “Heroes and Villains: Is Hip-Hop a Cancer or a Cure?”  In this speech Lecrae talked about how it is easy to look at certain people in history and label them as heroes or villains, but he talks about how not everyone views historical figures the same.  Lecrae started off by defining where we get the words, “Hero” and “Villain”.  Knowing the origin of these words really gave good context for what came to follow.  He then went o...
5 comments
Read more