PhiloPsycho Freedom

Today I thought I'd talk about advertisement. Do we actually pay as much attention to them as we think? or are we persuaded by external factors?

To start, I thought sexual content would be good because it's used over-abundantly. As they say, Sex Sells. But is that really the case? What research has actually been showing for the past while is that women aren't as persuaded by sexual content in advertisement, which isn't entirely a surprise. Obviously, the sexual content is there to sell the product to the male viewers, right? Well, that's what they're hoping, but what research is now showing is that when there's sexual content directed at males, men pay more attention to that content rather than the product; they're more likely to remember the girl (if they're straight) than they are to remember what the commercial was selling.

Next, I thought I'd cover some common fallacies covered within commercials.One of the most prevalent ones I've seen is the appeal to authority : citing someone else that is a proponent of a stance as proof that that particular stance is true. For example, If I were to say that light travels faster than sound (obviously true, but humour me) and I cited Einstein as stating this, this would be a valid appeal to authority because it's not a controversial topic, and he is an expert in the field of physics. This argument can also be fallacious when it's used in a controversial topic (disagreement among experts), or I'm not citing someone who is a credible member of that field. Two examples immediately jump to mind when I think about this fallacy: Duracell and Razor blades.

The Duracell commercial (I think it's Duracell, I can't find a YouTube for it, though) goes a little something like this: This fire department is out there saving lives everyday, and their tools need batteries. When it absolutely must work, they use Duracell because they know it's reliable and it lasts! This commercial is a perfect example of a fallacious appeal to authority because they're citing a group that has no idea what the inner workings of a battery are, necessarily. For all we know, they could not be using Duracell, but for argument's sake, let's say they are. There are a few other reasons they could be using this particular brand of battery: It was on sale; brand marketing worked on whoever the purchaser was; they have a contract with the company and get a really great price on batteries. Any given Firefighting department certainly isn't an expert on electrochemical cells, and it's doubtful that Duracell is significantly different than any other particular brand of battery. The second example are those damn razor commercials where they have tennis and golf players promoting their razor. Why is a tennis or golf player overly concerned with having hairless skin? If they even wanted to make a semi-relevant ploy and still pick a sports star, they should pick a swimmer because they actually need to be hydrodynamic!

Another common fallacy is the false dichotomy, also known as the false dilemma. This fallacy tricks the listener into thinking that there are only two options when there are, in fact, alternatives. A commercial I'm sure that we're all familiar with is the "Mac vs PC" commercials. The entire commercial is based around bashing PC and saying that, because PC is "bad", you must use a Mac, as there is no other option. There is another option, and it's name is Linux and the other Unix derivatives. As well, the arguments presented by Mac are often fallacious in themselves. Just look at how they present each Operating system: PC is some dumpy looking, uncool, older businessman who can hardly stand up for himself; Mac is some supposedly "hip", in with the times, articulate young guy who barely says a word but still manages to make the bumbling PC trip over himself. That is called poisoning the well: adverse information about a target is preemptively presented to an audience, with the intention of discrediting or ridiculing everything that the target person is about to say.

This commercial is a perfect example of one of their arguments. What's ironic about this particular one is that they say that Vista has many flaws, yet they don't mention anything about Mac. This is a false inference because there's an unstated argument that Mac has better security than Vista. What's interesting is that there was a study done at MIT that concluded that the standard Mac OS was easily hacked, while Vista still took a professional hacker much longer (again, I will cite this when I have more time).

The point of this post is to consider the arguments from commercials even if you're a proponent of that product. Maybe they're using fallacies to push their product because they don't have any other good arguments, or maybe they're hoping it'll goad us to accept their arguments without consideration.

For further interest in logical fallacies, check out this site.