Cultural Rhetoric

Hey kids!  Let’s talk about illegal sneaker dealing.  I recently watched a ted talk called The Secret Sneaker Market- And Why It Matters.  In this speech, Josh Luber talked about how popular sneaker brands, like Nike, dominate the secondary sneaker market.  He analyzes this sneaker market and compares it to the stock market. He starts the talk by revealing that he is a sneaker collector and keeps track of the sneaker market.  This is showing ethos.  He proves that he is credible.  He also makes it interesting for the audience by having pictures and having a chart.  He makes his speech interesting by describing the hype that sneaker collectors cause in the market. He did, however, use rhetoric in a bad way consistently.  He compared the illegal selling of sneakers to drug dealing.  He said that this act was encouraging kids to start illegally selling things.  This was a false analogy.  Sneaker selling is not similar enough ...

Recently, the South African branch of the Salvation Army organization released an advertisement which was to help show the severity of domestic violence. However, they do it in a very interesting and clever way. When ‘the dress’ debate began to spread across social media, the Salvation Army used this to their advantage in order to promote their advertisement. The advertisement shows an image of a woman whose body is bruised and is wearing a white and gold dress. This would surely capture the attention of anyone who was aware of the dress which went viral over the internet. But they would soon come to find that the advertisement was not forming an opinion about what color the dress was, but rather about informing people about the prevalent issue of domestic abuse against women. I think what is especially influential about the advertisement is the message which goes along with it: “Why is it so hard to see black and blue? The only illusion is if you think it was her choice. One in s...

While driving home one day I heard a commercial for Geico insurance. It was a guy talking about how he should have a 5 year plan, for his life. And when he told his girlfriend, he didn't include her in it. This got her mad and she broke up with him. So he said "Now I know to include my girlfriend in my plan, and I also know that Geico could save me %15 or more on car insurance". Bringing up the Geico insurance was completely unrelated. First he was talking about one thing: his job, life, significant other, and now he is talking about car insurance. These two points are completely different. The beginning was only to engage the listener in the commercial. We are supposed to either feel bad or laugh about how he didn't include his girlfriend in his plan, and now he randomly brings up the point that he also learned about the "awesome deal" he could get from Geico. This can be perceived in two ways, either laughing at him, or an appeal to pity. We could be l...

We have all walked down the cereal and have stopped to see the latest Wheaties box featuring a popular athlete or individual. The entire cereal box industry is teeming with advertisements meant to target certain people. The sugary cereals use bright colors and comical characters which catch kids’ attention and lure them into the false idea that that cereal is the one for them. The healthy cereals target those adults who want simplicity, health and peace in their lives by using soothing tones like white and brown. This particular Wheaties box uses the popularity of those featured on the box to grab the attention of the customer that walks by the shelf. Typically called the appeal to authority, the ploy that the Wheaties brand enforces appeals to the notoriety of a particular star. It is the breakfast of champions, after all. IF you are a champion, then you must eat Wheaties for breakfast. The Wheaties brand uses this logic to influence customers to buy Wheaties cereal. In order to...

I saw a Shake Weight For Men commercial on YouTube. It started with a really muscular and well-shaped guy working out with Shake Weight and the narrator saying, “This is not a workout. This is a revolution.” The guy in the commercial kept working out and seemed satisfied with his intense exercise. The narrator emphasized the words “guaranteed,” “stronger” and “faster” and said that anyone who uses the product can build definition, size, and strength of all kinds of body muscles in six minutes. It showed some graphs and a doctor explaining it to prove that Shake Weight is a science fact, not a fiction, and then showed a couple of interviews with other muscular men who tried Shake Weight and were impressed by its effectiveness. It also compared Shake Weight with standard dumbbell and other company’s product to show how much more effective it is than other products. At the end, the narrator challenged the viewers by saying, “Think you can handle it? Then call now.” The advertisement u...

While watching a YouTube video the other day I saw a commercial for ESL and Intel. During the commercial it shows a series of different people mixed with famous gamers saying how every gamer is the same in the way that they are all different. This is a classic example of several different fallacies already, but then, it shows all the people saying “I’m a gamer” one by one and then altogether in a group at the end. One main fallacy that is used here is mob appeal. It is trying to get you to feel that you are part of a group of people who are all gamers like you. Then, they are also appealing to the use of authority because they have famous gamers in there along with regular people. So they are making use of the feeling of camaraderie but then they are also using a sense of awe by having famous people there as well. This can be very convincing while advertising for something, but the problem with this commercial is that there really is not anything that it is advertising for. There i...

When I am on the internet, I usually ignore the ads on the side of the web site. However recently I have begun to pay more attention to them.  I found two images advertising for the same things in the same way. They were saying that cigarettes led to death. Both had a simple layout, with as little words as possible. The first photo had a picture of a bullet and under it said ‘Quick’ then a picture of a cigarette and below that ‘Slow.’ The second photo is what looks like a car after an accident. The car was crunched and smoking. However if you look closer the car has taken the place of a cigarette after it has been put out.   To the side of the car it says “Do you know how much you really spend on cigarettes?” This ad takes a lot more thought to figure what it is actually saying.  I was curious, was this ad saying that a cigarette can hurt you more than a car accident? Or that smoking in some way can cause an accident? So I googled the website at the bottom of the photo...

I was watching TV last Saturday, and a commercial came on. The commercial was about the Philadelphia 76ers and their new basketball camp they were opening. They had players from every team to come and show how effective the camp was. There were NBA players from Mavericks, Heat, Celtics, and Thunder. This was the logical fallacy of illegitimate authority. They use those players because most young kids look up to them. So this will make kids go to their camp because if their favorite player from that team was at the camp that means they will be there when they will go. Although the camp cost $120, kids were signing up one after another. I was thinking about signing up but then I realized that those exact players will not be there. They just used them to lure customers in. This fallacy is very effective and is used a lot in our marketing society. Most things that we buy today are because we either saw a celebrity get it or the bandwagon mentality. This mainly affects clothes and shoe...

When watching television, we have a tendency to skip over commercials because we are not interested in watching them. We just want the program to come back on, and with all the television channels now available, we can constantly flip through channels, avoiding as many commercials as possible. This creates a challenge for commercial creators. They now must create commercials that catch our eye and make us want to watch them. More and more, commercials are irrelevant to what product they are actually advertising. I came across a commercial that opened with lots of different animals. It begins showing an orangutan and a dog. It then switches to other animals like baby chicks and a cat, dogs and cats, an elephant and a sheep, a dog and a dolphin and even a dog with an elephant. My favorite is the deer being chased by a dog. The commercial ends with words across the screen saying, “Be together. Not the same.” I would have never guessed that this commercial was advertising for Android...

I saw a commercial the other night on TV while watching Amish Mafia. Right when I saw this commercial, I realized that there was something wrong. Let me start off by telling you what the commercial was: it was a commercial for Direct TV convincing you that having Direct TV is better than having cable. An actor by the name of Rob Lowe comes on screen stating that he has Direct TV and then an alternate dead beat dad version of him comes on as well stating that he has cable. The real Rob Lowe would state all the pros about having Direct TV while the dead beat dad would state the cons of cable, which included his children fighting over what to watch, but that’s their step dads problem while he gambles in an alley and then he saves money by having surgery in a motel room. Here’s the part that struck me, at the end he said “don’t be like this me, get rid of cable and upgrade to Direct TV”. Apparently if you don’t want to be a dead beat you have to have Direct TV. There are two logical f...

On Tuesday I was at Wal-Mart getting supplies for my omnibus art project. While there I kept seeing their slogan conveniently placed around price signs. I saw it by the things that are frequently bought like deodorant, toothpaste, hand sanitizer, Advil, and sunscreen. These common items are located in the center of walkways. Wal-Mart also has lots of commercials on television and ads on YouTube and Facebook, which are also frequented. There slogan is "Save Money. Live Better." By placing their slogan in places that we continually see, they ensured that we would see their slogan, drilling the message into our heads: “If you shop at Wal-Mart you save money, if you save money your life will be better, therefore shopping at Wal-Mart makes your life better.”  Wal-Mart tries to get you to think that through buying from them you will not only save money (because you can save money in lots of places) you do it better while leading a better life. Although I recognized this use of...

Several years ago, I remember watching several commercials in which Subway would use top sports players in their commercials in order to promote their product. One in particular that I remember is the commercial with Michael Phelps. In the commercial, it shows Michael swimming and training for the Olympics. In the middle of his training, the announcer is saying how training is a lifelong passion, and then his mother comes in with a Subway footlong sandwich, and then the announcer states that that passion is fueled by a passion for footlongs. This is an example of a false cause fallacy because it is saying that Michael became a famous and successful swimmer because of his passion for footlong subs. The next line is a sneaky one that many don’t catch, but the announcer then says, “That’s why Debbie Phelps is always there for her son Michael.” Seems harmless enough but it is really an appeal to emotion. It is saying that in order to be a good mother, you need to buy Subway for your ki...

Billboards have a common appearance in our everyday lives because they are used to grab your attention as well as make you think or act a certain way. Billboards are usually placed on the sides of highways and busy streets in order for many people to see them. The Elm Grove Police Department in Wisconsin uses this to their advantage by the creation of interactive billboards which were made to help spread the idea of “slower is better” while driving. Each of the billboards showed the speed of each passing driver, which was then used to represent the amount of money a person might have to pay if they were to get into an accident, how many days they could spend in the hospital due to their speed, and the percentage of having a car crash based off of their speed. By showing this kind of information to drivers, this makes them think twice before they make the choice to speed or drive too fast for the road conditions. I think the arguments made by the usage of the billboards are reasonab...

Looking up fallacies is always funny. There are nerdy jokes, political argument, and panda pictures. I was looking at some of these laughable pictures and a came across a picture of a panda. My love for pandas immediately drew me to it. Upon taking a closer look I read what it said; "If silent movies are black and white and pandas are black and white, then pandas must be silent movies!" That statement is a logical fallacy. A logical fallacy is an argument based off of an illogical statement or invalid information. A non sequitur fallacy is a conclusion or statement that does not logically follow the previous argument or statement. Basically that means that because thing 'B' has something in common with thing 'A' it must also have the same relation to thing 'C' that thing 'A' has. Just because pandas and silent movies share the trait of being black and white does not mean that they are mutually the same, as we can tell. This form of rhetor...

A few days ago, I saw Dove’s men’s shampoo commercial on Facebook. It started with an office worker walking through an office. He stopped in front of his fellow worker’s desk and called him. The fellow worker lifted his head, flipping his unrealistically gorgeous long hair with a sound effect. Seeing that, the man stood stiffened, staring at his coworker with confusion on his face. Then the hair started to fly around again. The man asked, “Did you do something on your hair? Because I see that women’s shampoo commercial effect.” The coworker remembered that he used a girl’s shampoo in the morning and rushed out the office to a store, fluttering his hair. He grabbed a Dove men’s shampoo and washed his hair with it. After that, he looked in the mirror confidently with a normal length man’s hair and breathed a sigh of relief. Then the commercial said, “Women’s shampoo isn’t made for you. Dove Men+Care is.” The advertisement was trying to make the viewers think that men should use men’...

I was watching TV with my sisters one night over Christmas break and Cheerios commercial came on. The commercial was about a family: the Dad had to work a 3rd shift and you could tell it was a struggle for everyone. It starts with the mom and son eating breakfast and the dad leaving. You see the son, Max, looking slightly heartbroken. Then the camera shows a house at night. The little boy gets out of bed and sneaks into the kitchen. He opens the fridge and is pulling out the milk when his clearly exhausted dad enters. When he sees his son awake, he asks what he is doing and, with complete innocence the little boy replies “I just wanted to eat breakfast with you.” At this point, my sisters and I all went “Aww!” (as I am sure most of women would say). The commercial ends with the father and the son sitting at the table eating cheerios. The commercial was effectively trying to persuade you to buy cheerios. The video almost entirely relies on pathos to make its argument strong. I thin...

It was a Sunday afternoon and we were watching football. This commercial came on about buying a new clothing trend. They had Zac Efron modeling clothes. He was modeling underwear from Abercrombie and Fitch. Then They had another commercial with Justin Bieber modeling the Calvin Klein underwear. This was appealing to Illegitimate Authority. It’s this fallacy because they used two celebrities to model. They only used them because they were good looking.  Not everyone looks like Justin Bieber and Zac Efron in underwear. This lowers men’s self esteem. Some fat kids might find this insulting. This can make kids go into a non-eating habit. One kid in my class said and I quote “ Abercrombie doesn’t like fat kids.” I don’t know if he was upset. He sounded kind of angry. This is the exact things that I am talking about. Kids don’t like when they use fit people to model clothes that some can’t fit into. Zac Efron and and Justin Bieber are two males that are super fit. Sometimes this...

Last week I was watching TV, and saw a commercial for Old Spice. Everyone knows Old Spice for the ridiculous commercials. Although they are very funny they have no logical standpoint. Some of them say that they can make you fly, have extreme strength or even pick up any girl anywhere just by using Old Spice. Although I cannot speak from experience, I am very sure that Old Spice cannot make you fly, will not make you like superman, and will not be the only factor in getting girls to like you. Terry Crews, the poster boy for Old Spice, is a very muscular, outlandish character. They want to persuade you to believe that wearing Old Spice will make you more manly more muscular and all around better. It might make you smell better, but that’s about it. Despite the commercial being completely misleading and a little weird, it seems to be effective, Old Spice is a very popular brand and its commercials are pretty popular. No matter how strange or funny these commercials are they are effectiv...

Today while I was flipping through the ‘Spring Preview’ issue of the magazine Bazaar, I came across an advertisement for Clinique’s Clinique Smart, which is supposedly a new ‘custom repair serum’. For those of you that don’t know, Clinique is a cosmetic company that sells over-priced makeup and skin care products. This new product is claimed to be capable of using its patented technology to custom repair skin as needed, where needed, for all ages and ethnicities. The advertisement also says, “Meet a serum smart enough to understand your skin’s past and change its future.” First of all, can we just talk about how ridiculous it is to personify a skin care product!? Not only do they talk about this product as if it has mystical powers, they also speak as if this product can mentally “understand your skin’s past” and physically “change its future”. I don’t know how effective this product is, as I have never used it, however, my guess is that it does not actually have these powers. To p...

Have you seen this? Anyone travelling through the Philadelphia area has seen this billboard. It simply states, “I hate Steven Singer!” This expression of seemingly unprovoked hatred for a random man appears to be the object of an angered citizen. However, it does get the attention of the individual who saw it. Because the individual saw it, she will Google it on her handy dandy smartphone. There, she will click on the link to the story that sparks this creative ruse of a billboard. She will find that the quote, “I hate Steven Singer!” is actually the utterance of a customer who bought an engagement ring for his fiancé and later another ring to commemorate their twentieth anniversary, resulting in a baby shortly later. He then stated these four words and inspired this phenomenon, all due to the amazing skill of the advertisement team at Steven Singer Jewelers. Though it is kind of a far stretch, this advertisement wanted to draw attention to Steven Singer Jewelers and attempt to ge...