The Rhetoric of Ads

For some reason, I've been thinking a lot about advertisements lately. Maybe it's thinking back to the beginning of the semester, when we focused on them a lot. They are incredibly interesting rhetorically.

First, the point of every ad is to get more people to buy this particular product. We have all seen so very many ads by the time we have any income to dispose of on that product, so the creators of these ads have to become very creative to get our attention. There are several ways to go about this, and I'll talk about the onw I find most interesting.

The one I find most interesting are what I think of as anti-ads. They know most people tune ads out, and don't try to hide the fact that they are an ad. They basically yell right out at you, "We know that you know we're only trying to sell this. And that's fine." These remind me of anti-jokes in a way. An anti-joke takes a traditional joke opening, but makes the punchline deliberately unfunny or extremely weird. The confusion following from the unexpected unfunniness makes the anti-joke funny. It's really weird, but good ones usually are funny. Anti-ads are essentially trying to do the same thing. They are confronting that people are expecting their "punchline," or pitch to buy their product, and hoping this makes the consumer want to buy their product. Usually breaking the third wall does this. If done well, I think this is so extremely effective. These anti-ads get us to pay attention to them.

The most recent example of this I can think of is the Dr. Pepper 10 commercials. They immediately confront the fact that they are displaying an ad for a soda right away, and even tell everyone who their consumer base is: men. I think there is some extremely interesting rhetoric behind this. Are they trying to tempt women into buying their product by saying they aren't allowed to have it? Or are they trying to have men feel part of a fraternal Dr. Pepper organization? Probably both, or whatever gives them the most sales. Regardless, I think the commercials are pretty funny.