The Rhetoric Of Advertising

Advertisements In today’s world, we are surrounded by advertisements. They are in shopping malls, busses, televisions, grocery stores and any other place you can think of! Any successful advertisement appeals to one of three main things: emotions, logic, or credibility. In other words, any successful advertisement appeals to Ethos, Logos or Pathos. These successful advertisements describe the company, the product that they are trying to sell, the price of the product, any anything else they can use to try and convince the public to buy their product. For Example: During the Super Bowl, just a 30 second time slot for advertising can cost a company millions of dollars. However, the company will usually rake in just as much, if not more money. They do this by appealing to your wants and desires. When you are watching the game on your flatscreen, relaxing at home, and the advertisement for a McDonalds burger comes on, they will try to appeal to you with Logos saying that it’s from the dollar menu and extremely affordable. They will try to appeal to your pathos by saying that its under 200 calories and therefore will not gain you any weight. They will also try to appeal to your ethos by reinforcing the fact that the company is McDonalds and you can trust the company since it is so widely known and been running for years. One of the first SHWAG items that I found on my invisible walk in downtown, was a chipotle menu. This menu has all the items that Chipotle sells and how many calories each item has. It also contains the price of each item. The goal of this menu was to get customers to buy their food more often. Usually just the thought of Chipotle is enough to make most people’s mouth water. Therefore, once someone has this menu, every time they look at the menu they are going to be reminded of Chipotle and therefore there is a greater chance of them having Chipotle for lunch or dinner. The menu mainly focuses on Logos because it is trying to appeal to your logical