Super Bowl Commercials

The Super Bowl is the biggest and most popular sports event of the year in the United States. This year’s game in particular was one of the most important of all Super Bowls. The undefeated New England Patriots tried to make their record 19-0 with a win against the New York Giants, but they came up short. The importance of this game, as with all the other Super Bowls, was recognized by companies trying to advertise their service or product. I heard one statistic on ESPN that stated that approximately half of the American population watched this year’s Super Bowl at some point. With all of these people tuning in, the commercials are usually attention-grabbing and interesting. Companies pay large amounts of money to air their commercials during the Super Bowl, so they make them creative. They also want to make the commercials persuasive.

This year I was not very impressed with most of the Super Bowl commercials. There were only a few that I even remember. These commercials include the E-Trade baby, the Doritos rat, the Tide stain, and the Bridgestone screaming critters. All of these were quite funny and I enjoyed watching them, but the most persuasive was the Bridgestone screaming critters commercial. The commercial starts by showing a squirrel with an acorn in the middle of the road. He sees a car coming at him and he screams instead of moving out of the way. Other animals, such as an owl, a rabbit, and a raccoon, are also shown screaming at the top of their lungs. Finally, it shows a woman in the passenger seat of the car who is also screaming. Her husband, the driver, looks at her and then back at the road and he easily swerves around the squirrel. The squirrel then stops screaming and acts like nothing happened.

I found this to be a very persuasive commercial for several reasons. First, it is extremely attention-grabbing and funny. The screams made me quite alert and my attention was focused completely on the commercial. Second, I did not want to see the squirrel get hurt. The use of all of the different animals captures people’s emotion. When the car swerved around the squirrel, I was relieved to see that he was safe. Third, the driver of the car looked confident when he saw the squirrel and swerving around the animal was no problem. All of this was attributed to Bridgestone tires. The commercial illustrates that these tires will give you a sense of confidence on the road and they will help you avoid accidents.