TOW Post 6: Old Spice Comercials

Old Spice has one of the most successful advertisement campaigns.  Its most recent editions feature wide receiver Wes Welker.  This serves two purposes.  It gives Old Spice a famous sponsor in Welker.  It also connects Old Spice to the sport of football, which is a manly sport.  Old Spice always tries to portray this manly theme.  They sell men’s grooming products.  Since it is a brand purely to be used by men they take this theme and run with it associating itself with manliness.  These current commercials come with the beginning of the season, taking advantage of a current situation.  One of the commercial feature Wes playing well, taking a long shower at half time and missing the second half.  This shows their connection with humor also.  This is an attention grabber.  Since there is not much logically that can set apart types of body washes Old Spice uses these right brain techniques to get and keep watchers attention.  These Old Spice commercials work well because they have such a specific audience and direct these advertisements at this audience with commercials that would likely not appeal on a wider scale.  What this means is that the commercials directly try to be manly and funny.  Since Old Spice knows its possible clientele are men they do not have to try to appeal to women.  For this reason they can directly advertize for men, making their ads manly and funny, because these are the ideas that work the best with men.  Men want to be manly and funny and football players are manly and the commercials are funny so people think that if they use Old Spice they would be manly also and funny.  This works well because they have been doing well since the original campaign of this type came out.

TOW 5: Are Chicks Brighter Than Babies? by Nicholas D. Kristof

Many articles talk about how unjust veal is, and law enforcement delivers punishment for the mishandling of cats and dogs, but it is not easy to find arguments against the maltreatment of poultry.  In the case of Are Chicks Brighter Than Babies?  Kristof does.  Nicholas Kristof has experience with the farming of poultry.  Before graduating from Harvard and becoming an award winning journalist he grew up on a sheep and cherry farm.  He uses an anecdote from this time as a method of getting his point across.  He talks about the relationships between geese and how when he would take one to the chopping block its mate would follow.  This short story really helps his article along because it shows his experience along with getting the readers’ emotions going.  Kristof also uses the assistance of the time, right after a salmonella outbreak, as another assistor.  He uses it as a lead saying that it is not the only reason not to eat chicken as well as using its attention to springboard his idea and have it start as a more important piece.  The last technique that Kristof uses is to talk about the animals in reference to how smart they are.  He talks about how they can count and how they are even about as smart as toddlers.  This is in an effort to appeal again to people’s emotions due to the fact that they feel as if the animals are more important if they are smarter.  All of these methods work in convincing his more middle aged audience of his purpose.  The fact that although it is not bad to eat poultry from time to time it is important to realize where they are coming from and that they are not the idiots that we take them to be.

TOW 4: What's Wrong With Matt by Sage Rosenfels

In light of Matt Schaubs recent failures as quarterback of the Huston Texans, Sage Rosenfels shares perspective from his experience at the position.  Sage Rosenfel played in the NFL for eleven years, two of them in Huston with Schaub.  In his times he had similar problems to Schaub although over the course of his career he was mainly a backup.  From this experience he talks about what is wrong with Schaub and what is to blame for his week start.  He chalks another one up to mental pressure saying that once a player starts to mess up the problems snowball until it is almost impossible to recover.  He addresses all of these facts in an effort to show many, likely male, big time football fans, or atleast Huston fans, a new view of what is happening.  With the quick drop in Schaub’s skill level from one year to the next, throwing three quarters of the picks of last year in less then one fifth of the games, many questions are quickly raised, one of the biggest being should Huston start on the quarterback search.  Although not trying to take a position on the issue, Rosenfels offers many opinions on the issue including the fact that he does not think there really is an issue with Schaub.  Rosenfels appeals to his own experience I an effort to help him prove his point.  Rosenfels speaks on how, during his second season with the Texans, he fell into a rut.  During his first start of four that season he lost the game in the final few minutes based partly on an aggressive dive followed by two pics.  After that he was unable to regain his confidence, making his year hell.  This technique really helps him get across his point because it shows he knows what he is doing because he has been there before.  This shows that he is one of a small number of people with the experience to talk giving him the right to speak.

TOW Post 3: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

In the book Outliers Malcolm Gladwell aims to shift his readers view on what truly makes people successful.  He offers many different views on different “outliers” from simple junior hockey players to the greats of the Beetles.  He points out little know facts about these people which help to craft them into the characters they become, and share how those small details on the side are the true contributors to the lives they ended up living.  Gladwell is an incarnation of his own idea of 10,000 hours.  He has been working as a journalist at the New Yorker for almost two decades and is now coming out with his fifth book this year and it looks to be as big a hit as his first four.  His first two books have sales in the millions and has had his writings named some of the best non-fiction works.  He does have an odd writing style however.  All of his ideas come in the form of anecdotes.  Gladwell likes to tell short stories of the ideas that exemplify his points so that it is not simply an abstract idea but one that is demonstrated by real people, some of them even being household names.  This style of writing really helps him in getting his ideas across to his reader.  By giving examples for his points he can ground his ideas not in abstract language but something that a reader could go out and look up.  Gladwell also does a good job of diversifying his stories, talking about anything from athleticism, in hockey, to computer programmers, in Bill Joy, to the biggest billionaires the world has ever seen, like Rockefeller.  The issue with this style though is that it has gained a lot of criticism.  It has been critiqued because it only shows small ideas to prove a bigger point.  Many people further criticize Gladwell simply because he is a journalist and not a scientist.  No matter what the criticism however Gladwell continues to write interesting pieces with different ideas, and Outliers is no outlier.