A Horde of Advertisments

Television envelops the lives of all Americans. We turn it on in the morning for the news and weather reports for the day. We plan our schedules around primetime television for our favorite shows. During the fall, we sit for hours upon hours watching football; college on Saturday and professional on Sunday. The month of March brings March Madness and then television even spills into our work schedules and we find ways to watch games online. Wherever you look, you can basically be guaranteed to find televisions. Since Americans rarely go one day without turning on the television, TV has come to be the place for commercials and advertisements and endorsements. Companies will pay hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars for their product to shine for thirty seconds or if they shell out the big bucks a whole minute. And when do the majority of Americans all sit down and watch TV at the same exact time: the Superbowl.

Millions of Americans all plan their day and even their week around the National Football League’s Superbowl around this time every year. Parties are planned weeks in advance and millions of pounds of chips and dip are bought off the shelves to feed the partygoers. And during the game while millions of Americans are too full to get off the couch, companies and producers are constantly and consistently selling their products through thirty-second segments. Products from chips to soda to beer to candy to cars and everything in between are marketed and targeted to the Superbowl audience for those three or four hours that the game is on. Even after the Superbowl news stations and celebrity shows rank the commercials and make episodes out of Countdowns of the Best Superbowl Commercials. Websites are devoted to categorizing and ranking the commercials. Some sites even separate the commercials by when they were played during the game.

Companies are professionals at using persuasive rhetoric strategies to expertly market and hopefully successfully entice the audience into buying their product. Many commercials use professional athletes, actors and actresses to star in the commercials as the focus and employing ethos. During last years’ Superbowl, Brett Favre, Troy Polamalu, and Danica Patrick were all featured in commercials as endorsers for various products. By using professional athletes, the companies give credibility to their products. The American public sees it as if those stars and athletes use those products and get those results than if I use those products I’ll get those results too. Companies also use pathos and humor to tempt the public to buy their products. One Doritos commercial takes an anti-bark collar off a dog and puts in on a man eating a Bag of Doritos that he previously failed to share with the dog. The man ends up lying on the ground in pain from being shocked after the dog repeatedly barked while the man was stuck wearing the collar and the dog ends up with the bag of chips as his snack. I feel like Logos takes a backseat in the persuasiveness of Superbowl commercials. With only thirty seconds to grab the audience companies do not need to be boring with facts and figures. They strike hard and fast with humor or a star that people will be able to remember hours later.

Commercials have perfected the act of creating the most perfect commercial for its thirty-seconds of fame during the Superbowl. And lately, it has become more about the commercials than it is about the teams actually playing in the most exciting game of their lives.

Here’s a link to a page of Superbowl commercials from the 2010 Superbowl:

http://superbowlads.fanhouse.com/