Jell-O Commercial

Paige Walberg

Professor McCloud

English 1301

June 29, 2014

TV Commercial Analysis

A son and his father are sitting at their table the dad pronounces, “I love Jell-O.” “Why?” the son asked, “Well…” the father began listing off the typical dad’s life to his son. The camera pans to the son as he visualizes himself in his dad’s shoes. The dad tells his son that every morning he wakes up “with a little less hair” the son is then shown in his dad’s clothes staring in the mirror with little hair on top of his head. Then he has to “drive to work in heavy traffic” says the dad as you see the child nervously driving barely able to see over the steering wheel driving in between two semi-trucks. The dad then explains to his son when he got
to work his boss had told him “the project he had been working on for a year was canceled.” You see the son coloring a picture as his boss takes it away and rips it up, the camera then pans back to the child’s distraught face. The dad and the son are back at the table and the dad states that “Jell-O pudding makes up for all of that.” The son looks at his dad and hands him his pudding, “here, you need this more than me” (Jell-O pudding)

Jell-O’s goal was to achieve the audience of fathers and sons in this specific advertisement.
They had shown the father’s everyday life through the eyes of his child associating both roles in the commercial. The advertisement proves to be ethos relating the fathers depicted day to a typical fathers everyday life. The Jell-O in the commercial is used to portray their pudding as a stress reliever and it “makes up for all of that” relative to the father’s bad day. At the end of the commercial the child hands his father the Jell-O after visualizing the day his dad had at work, this held the audience hostage to the adorable child generously giving his hardworking father his one Jell-O pudding snack using the pathos
affect.

The sole purpose of the commercial was to motivate the buyer to buy Jell-O products because it relieves all of their stress and puts them in a better mood.
Jell-O makes the audience think of their horrible day at work and how they could relate to the father and son. They do so in the commercial by causing them to feel like they need the pudding to relieve their stress and believe that it actually works. When the father states that “I love Jell-O” and begins telling his son about his day and because of the connection fathers have with his circumstance they would want to feel the same way the father in the commercial did after eating the pudding.
The tone that is portrayed in the commercial is humorous yet bleak. Using the child to replay the dad’s horrible day of work and with the imagery of a child with the leading hairlines, driving through traffic and working is quite comical. The horrible day the father had depicted the depressing side of a typical fathers’ daily life giving an upsetting tone to the
commercial.

Jell-O had sold its product effectively to the father and son audience through real life situations but lacked in visuals of the pudding. The advertiser exceeded in adhering to their targeted audience and including both ethos and pathos effect grabbing the viewer’s attention with laughter and misery which is an effective way of getting a buyer to adhere to their product. People may see the product as delicious because the father said he “loves Jell-O” but, the advertisement does not say why he loves it or shows in detail the product itself to get a visual idea of what the buyers are going to be eating. Overall the commercial was successful in fulfilling their objective of portraying a realistic environment to grab the father and son audience for their product, Jell-O pudding.

Works Cited

Jell-O pudding. Advertisement. CW. 4 Jan 2014. Television