Persuasion in TV Ads

Persuasion in Television Advertisements

Advertising and marketing specialists frequently use specialized techniques to communicate with audiences by appealing to a specific type of customer and helping a brand or product to be memorable or appealing. Advertisements frequently accomplish this by using spokespeople, slogans, or visual symbols or displays that grab the intended audience's attention and appeal to the customer's curiosity, sense of ascetics or humor. This paper will assess two such television advertisements by sampling two different examples of popular commercials and analyzing the marketing tools used to capture audience attention and attract potential customers.

Geico: "Little Piggy"

Geico's "Little Piggy" advertisement begins with a handsome middle-aged man speaking directly to the audience. This spokesman begins by asking, "Could switching to Geico really save you 15% or more on car insurance?." The announcer then asks the rhetorical question, "Did the little piggy cry 'wee, wee, wee' all the way home?." The commercial then cuts to a video segment of an SUV driving down the road. A baby pig is hanging out of the vehicle window holding pinwheels in his hooves and crying, "wee, wee, wee." The baby pig is riding in the backseat of the SUV with a seatbelt fastened around him and a young boy is riding on the other side of the backseat. The driver is a middle-aged woman who is probably the boy's mother. The SUV pulls up in front of a house and the woman tells the pig, "Maxwell, you're home." The pig stops his yelling and replies, "Oh, cool. Thanks Mrs. A." The ad ends with an announcer saying, "Geico. Fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more."

The main appeal of Geico's message in this "Little Piggy" advertisement take a peripheral route of persuading the audience. The commercial captures the audience's attention with an arbitrary example of a talking pig having fun. The basic message here is that it is crazy or foolish to question whether you will save money if you buy insurance from Geico. The company appeals to customers using off beat humor, and many audience members will remember the company's name and the services they provide simply because the short message leaves a lasting, humorous impression on the observer.

Old Spice "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like"

Old Spice's "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" is also a commercial that uses peripheral persuasion techniques to draw the audience in to their promotion of their deodorant. The commercial presents a very attractive man holding a bottle of Old Spice body wash, and he speaks directly to the women in the audience, prompting the "Hello ladies. Look at your man. Now back to me. Now back to your man. Now back to me. Sadly he isn't me, but if he stopped using lady-scented body wash and switched to Old Spice he could smell like me."

The spokesman speaks clearly and convincingly, but the commercial is also designed to play on the irony of marketing techniques, as the spokesman tells the audience to look down, and his towel falls away, but he is wearing pants or look at his hands where he has an oyster that turns into tickets to s show, and then into diamonds. The humor and irony here is that the spokesman is not only attractive, but that using Old Spice makes him more "manly" and attractive because he has many desirable qualities that would please a female viewer.

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