The main stasis in Metrecal's 1960's commercial is Consequence. It is also known as Cause and Effect and can be found in most commercials then and now. Metrecal's cause and effect focuses on the benefits of drinking their product. The commercial states that if you drink Metrecal for lunch, you can eat whatever you want for dinner (within reason) and still lose weight. This might be a bit of a logical fallacy, since they never say how it works or how long you need to use it before seeing results. They leave their cause and effect open ended so you can come to your own conclusions. They also do this in order to save face if someone is unhappy with their product without having to admit to giving baseless information. Another stasis that could be applied here is Evaluation. When people see the commercial and hear what it has to say, they make up their own minds on whether the product is good or bad. This often goes hand in hand with cause and effect because most effects have positive or negative inflections depending on how the audience views them.
The commercial, SlimFast - Yes I did, is a relatively simple commercial. It opens with people dancing to a song while holding various SlimFast products. They all act very happy and excited, presumably because of the weight loss items they have. The people in this commercial are all attractive and are there to make customers think that they too can become attractive if they use these products to lose weight. This rhetorical situation, or Kairos, is one many Americans are familiar with. Since the later half of the 1900's, people were viewed as attractive only if they didn't exceed a certain weight. Because of this, many companies started looking into selling weight loss supplements. Today these are sold in many different forms such as food, drinks, and pills. Over the decades, weight loss products have become very popular in American culture. The weight loss industry makes upwards of 40 billion dollars a year, and even though there is evidence that the weight loss industry is lo...
I agree with your observations on the logical fallacies in this advertisement. While the stasis of the ad is cause and effect, its logic is flawed because losing weight does not happen with one drink once a day; it's a long process that focuses both on nutrition and exercise. I think cause and effect is the main stasis because more people would be willing to buy this product because of the consequences.
ReplyDeleteGreat analyses of the types of stases used in Metrecal's argument, but you do very little to address what Metrecal's argument actually is, and focus too much on Stasis theory behind it. As a result, your argument analysis of Metrecal doesn't seem very in depth, and your post is a bit short so you have room to add more. Another thing is to add links to your posts as I didn't see many. Dakota
ReplyDeleteYour observations of the main stasis of Metrecal's commercial are very accurate. I liked how you noted that the commercial allows for its audience to make its own assumptions based on the advertisement, not making the conclusions for them. With the audience coming to its own conclusions, Metrecal voids any blame for misinformation. How would sales in Metrecal differ if they provided more statistics, while maybe less glorifying of the drink, but as a marketing campaign to be invisible, and concrete evidence of weight loss from using it?
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with your analysis regarding the stasis theory in this text. You are definitely right. This commercial reveals little about what is in the Metrecal, and leaves the reader to assume that by solely having a Metrecal at lunch, you will be in shape and therefore, look like the fit individuals featured in this video. This seems very unrealistic and almost as if it's a joke.
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