T-Mobile | "Drop The Balls" Super Bowl Ad
The commercial's intended audience are viewers watching the Superbowl and within the Superbowl event, this ad is shown between breaks of this highly anticipated game that millions of people watch. within the superbowl audience, the more specific audience this advertisement intends to show is the cell phone provider consumers in America, specifically LTE consumers.
As for the techniques of persuasion, this ad strongly uses logos, ethos and a tint of pathos. The ethos included in this Advertisement is a famous celebrity, television host and a comedian Steve Harvey. Already using a famous person to deliver the advertisement the viewers are already going to be persuaded into listening to him and they are going to be even more interested in listening to what Steve Harvey says because due to context relations Steve Harvey hosted the show miss universe 2015.
The reason why this is significant is because he mistook the winner of miss universe from Colombia to the Philippines. This spark a media phenomenon and Steve Harvey was known as "that one host who got the winner wrong" or "that one host who failed at performing a simple task as a host". This lead the company T-mobile to create an advertisement with Steve Harvey saying "i have to apologize, again...". Using this phenomenon of Steve Harvey they already have people turning their heads on this advertisement and now with this knowledge of what he did, they constructed the logos section of persuasion in this advertisement and added ironic logic and facts in the ad.
The Ad started with a narrative voice stating facts about T-mobile's company. Regarding the information that the advertisement was giving off, Steve Harvey interrupted and said "listen folks, i have to apologize again. those were last year's numbers". He then gave concrete facts and statistics about T-mobiles improved service such as "T-mobile doubled LTE coverage in last year and now it has more LTE towers than Verizon, T-mobile pretty much reaches everyone." With this solid information he also uses a slight hint of Pathos because he addresses the message specifically to the audience as if they were close friends.
In the end, the advertisement cleverly uses Logos, Pathos and Ethos in a short amount of time in an advertisement to get the viewer interested and persuaded into paying attention to the advertisement and hearing what the T-mobile (ad creator) has to say to their audience.
Hi Rodrigo, you did a very good job analysing this advertisement. I do agree with the point you made about people more interested in the ad since Steve Harvey stars in it, however don't you think that perhaps Steve Harvey may not be the best person to star in this ad, as there was a large amount of controversy after he hosted the Miss Universe 2015 and messed up really bad (therefore people are less likely to take him seriously)?
ReplyDeleteThis was very good overall though!
Well written analysis, what an interesting individual to portray in an advertisement and a great way of using him.
ReplyDeleteHi Rodrigo, It is a very well written with each aspect of ethos, pathos, logos. I agree with with what you have to say for ethos and logos, but I disagree with pathos I feel it includes more pathos that there should be.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed listening and reading your analysis of this commercial. You have made great points in terms of the use of rhetorics in this advert, "The reason why this is significant is because he mistook the winner of miss universe from Colombia to the Philippines. This spark a media phenomenon and Steve Harvey was known as "that one host who got the winner wrong" or "that one host who failed at performing a simple task as a host". " I definitely agree with this valid point that I hadn't thought of before. I appreciate the way you extend your knowledge of pop-culture into your analysis, as it is very beneficial, Keep up the good work!
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