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Miah Fowler

Anderson

English 1010

19 November 2019

It’s All About Trust

Super Bowl commercials? What are those? Are they trying to just sell a product or are

they simply there to take up time in between breaks? Well, when you look closely they’re

actually trying to make you feel something. But what? Commercials and ads consist of many

different well thought out appeals to get inside the minds of their audience. These appeals are

well known as Ethos, Pathos, and Logos. They help the audience get on board through logic,

emotion, and credibility. In most commercials and ads, all the appeals are used to reach out to

different types of people. I took some time to look at two different super bowl commercials and

found that each appeal is used but ethical reasoning is used more than the others.

The first commercial I looked at was a Walmart commercial. This commercial was

advertising their new online order/pick up system. They used different cartoon characters from

different well known movies and had them “pick up” their orders from Walmart. The first appeal

I noticed from this commercial was how they stated that anyone can use Walmart pickup. By

stating the fact that anyone could use it and that it is easy and quick is using logic to get people

to use it. The way they showed this was getting crazy characters such as Bumblebee from

Transformers picking up his order. With him being a big transforming car shows the audience

that it doesn’t matter who it is, anyone is welcome to use pickup. But there were many other

ways that they used the cartoon characters.

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The wonderful workers of Walmart also decided to play with our emotions and no, not in

a bad way. In their pickup commercial, as I’ve already stated, they use cartoon characters from

well known movies. This can remind people of the good movies that they’ve seen and possibly

any positive feelings associated with those movies. For example, one of the characters that I saw

in the commercial was Cinderella. Seeing her magical pumpkin grow into a beautiful carriage

reminded me of when I was little and how I wanted to grow up and be a princess and do all the

things that a princess would do. This would make me want to use pickup just like Cinderella did.

The purpose of the appeal is to make the audience associate what they were promoting with good

feelings from their lives which should make them feel more inclined to want to use this way of

shopping. But while it reaches out to those emotional people in the audience, like me, it’s not

quite the strongest.

As most commercials use each of the three appeals at least a little bit, there is always

going to be one that is more focused on than the others. In this particular commercial it is ethos.

Walmart decided to mainly focus on using the movie characters to bring in the audience. While

logos and pathos can be incorporated into this, it is actually mainly being used as ethos. This is

because all the characters are from movies most of us love and grew up with. With that said, it is

given that most, if not all, of those characters are trusted images and lead the audience to trust the

commercial a little more than if it was just some random person off of the street saying that

pickup is available to anyone. However, not just any characters were chosen to be used in this

commercial. The writers of this commercial thought this out and chose movies that had gotten on

the top of the charts. For example, Bumblebee, my favorite character and possibly many others’

favorite showed up in this commercial and made me see that if Bumblebee was using pickup it
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must be good for me to use. Although we know that these characters didn’t actually use Walmart

pickup, it’s simply about the image it sends and the trust in that image.

The second commercial I took a look at was promoting Pepsi rather than a store. While

trying to sell two very different things these two commercials are actually very similar.

Sometimes it’s harder to see the appeals that aren’t meant to be as strong and in this Pepsi

commercial the hard appeal to see was the logic. In this commercial, Steve Carell is trying to say

that Pepsi is great to drink or in his words “more than okay.” Closer to the end of the video he

asks everyone involved what was learned. This basically is saying that they just went through a

learning process, where then a woman immediately responds saying she’ll take a Pepsi. Having

that response at the end of the video says that they were being taught a lesson that the only

logical choice for a drink is Pepsi as it is “more than okay.” But as with most commercials, logic

isn’t the only appeal used.

People are into all sorts of different shows, but a common category that everyone loves is

comedy. The main speaker of this commercial is a widely known actor, Steve Carell, who is

specifically known for his well rounded humor. Pepsi chose him specifically for this reason.

They wanted him to make us laugh and have a good feeling associated with this video and for me

it did just that. Steve Carell stated that Pepsi is “more than okay” and pointed to a dude and said

“okay?” When the dude didn’t respond with enough pride as Carell wanted he kind of just gave

the dude a weird look and questionably said okay and looked away from him. The facial

expressions of Steve Carell is where the humor comes from. The commercial is meant to give

people a good time especially during a superbowl it’s a relief of any stress from the game. Again,

associating good feelings with the commercial and possibly what is being sold.
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While emotion and logic was used very well in this commercial, they definitely weren’t

the strongest appeals. Again, like the Walmart commercial, the main usage of this commercial

was using trust to get people to want the product. As said before, this commercial had well

known actor Steve Carell along with a famous singers and rappers Cardi B and Lil Jon as the

speakers. I have noticed that our society likes to listen to other people instead of our own

opinions, so when companies use trusted people in their commercials people are more likely to

listen and buy the product. Ethos was strongest in this commercial because they used not only

one but two famous and well known people who could be trusted. This shows that they were

trying to aim towards that trust because there are probably many people who don’t know Steve

Carell, so when they use more than one trusted person, they widen the range of people trusted

people.

After I watched both of these commercials I didn’t think much about what they were

doing other than just selling a product. However, now that I’ve analyzed them I see that they are

doing much more than that. Typically, advertisers will use all three appeals in their ads and

commercials. But I noticed with superbowl commercials, such as the two I looked at, they tend

to use one more than the others. The Walmart and Pepsi commercials both heavily relied on

gaining the trust of the audience. All the companies have to do is make sure they’re choosing

well known and trusted characters and actors and they will most likely win a supporter.

Superbowl commercials do tend to play on emotions and give logical reasonings to buy their

product, but with such a big event and with how many people watch the superbowl, they want to

use credibility as an approach as most people tend to listen to others. Let’s not forget that it gives

a break from the stress of a game with an unknown outcome by seeing people they recognize and
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associate trust with. Which then leaves the audience open and ready to trust the next person

and/or product.