Rosser Reeves' Political Commercials & The Persuaders

It's funny that war, taxes, skyrocketing prices, and the theme of "change" was used in Eisenhower's ad campaign, just as it is today. The creators of the campaign ads rely less on full pathos, and more on flawed logic. The political commercials seem to use a lot of fallacies of logic in their ads. They use forms of bandwagoning and irrelevant facts to sway people's decision making.

Song Airlines relied purely on pathos, giving no ethical or logical arguments in their main advertisements. Song airlines focused on specifically not making arguments. They focused on visuals, music, and symbolism. These elements were made to create feelings, rather than arguments.

One thing to make note of is the fact that these are completely different videos with completely different purposes. Yes, both sets of videos are created to persuade people. However, one set of videos is geared towards creating lasting customers and primarily persuading people to buy something. The other set was created to persuade citizens of a country to vote for a person. The creators, then, have different things to pull from. Voters' freedom, liberty, and patriotism is focused on as a responsibility. The commercials tend to create a culture out of imagery that focuses on feelings, as well as telling the audience that the audience has a problem (and the creators of the ad have the solution to that problem). Now, of course, there is plenty of overlap, but the mindsets are different for the end result, so the strategies do differ.

As the video The Persuaders talked about, success in advertizing and persuading goes beyond logic. This is why advertizing companies study cults and apply theories of that sociology to exploit peoples' need to belong. In both advertizing to sell and advertizing to vote, the goal seems to be to create loyalty beyond reason. Even if this is not the goal, it is definitely the end result. People have loyalty without thought, and it's scary on any side of the spectrum. We are a society conditioned to avoid the use of our most precious gift: the freedom to think.