"Omg, inbg."

     If you and I are having a peaceful night-in, popping microwaveable goodies and downing as much caffeine in our systems as humanly possible and I don’t scream at you to find the clicker so that we can change the awful and pointless commercial on, that’s how you can be certain that this commercial is a good one.  Commercials like this are rare. You know, the ones that intrigue you from the initial second and keep you laughing until the final 30^th second. Due to our irony-hungry and easily jaded generation, more and more we viewers are seeing commercials that are not just informatory, but interesting as well.

     There is a strict criteria for a successful commercial. It must be persuasive, captivating, humorous, relatable, and memorable. All of these elements demonstrate forms of rhetoric that the creator forces on the audience to get their point across. Once the point is apparent to the viewer, the main goal is for the audience to follow, purchase, or spread the word about the subject seen through that magical talking box.

     The Cingular commercial below in particular illustrates a simple form of rhetoric in which the company is attempting to persuade current and new costumers to purchase the unlimited texting. The commercial uses common ideologies, or a commonplace, about modern American families.

     Cingular carefully positions the commercial in the setting of a typical upper middle class household which is the primary demographic of their customers. They use an argument to spark a sense of familiarity in the viewers due to the inevitable confrontations between every parent and teenager that have ever walked this fine earth and also the rise of “text lingo” that baffle all people still.  This understanding is a way of using ethos and pathos to generate emotion in the audience rather than using something like a dying cat to make viewers feel heartbroken. Cingular’s approach creates familiarity but keeps the element of humor intact.

    Even the minute things, like spelling out the foreign language (well it might as well be foreign) of the teenager at the bottom of the screen keeps the viewers transfixed. Also, keeping the commercial short, sweet, and to the point and then introducing an entire screen of bright colored orange to grab attention once more forces the audiences’ mind to relate back to the main argument at hand.

     All these features of the rhetoric Cingular commercial not only solved my conflict a couple years ago of excessive texting  which led to not-so-excessive checking accounts, but still has me saying “idk my bff jill.”