Monday, October 6, 2014

Logos of the 1960s Newport Commercial

At first glance, there appears to be no appeal to logos in this commercial at all. What is logical about a couple jumping out of a TV to give a man a cigarette?

Not much, honestly. The only argument that I can analyze through logos is the following:

"[Newport is] the freshest taste in menthol cigarettes."

What are the parts of this argument?

Claim (Implied): You should buy Newport cigarettes.
Reason: Newport is the freshest taste in menthol cigarettes.
Warrant / Underlying Assumption: Fresh tasting cigarettes are better.
Backing: Fresh tasting things are typically better than things that do not taste fresh.

Goodness, it looks
like other cigarette
companies did assert
they were fresher!
An issue this argument has is that it has no grounds, or support for its reason. Newport offers no evidence as to why Newport is the freshest taste in menthol cigarettes. It would be easy for a competing cigarette company to offer a rebuttal, or to even assert that they have the freshest taste in menthol cigarettes. From the perspective of logos, it would be helpful to run some kind of survey of cigarette users about which cigarette they feel is freshest.

The backing, or support for the warrant, is much harder to attack. It just makes sense to me by intuition that fresh tasting things taste better. I don't smoke, but if I did I would probably ones that tasted fresh.

2 comments:

  1. I agree with you that there is no appeal to logos within this commercial; the commercial mainly appeals to pathos by design. If you were marketing a product that does more harm than good then it would only seem logical to target your audience's emotions.

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  2. This analysis is exactly right. No logical arguments are made for people to buy Newport cigarettes. This is likely because of the negative effects of cigarettes. If people new those, they would be less inclined to buy them, so the commercial uses appeals to pathos.

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