Commander Rhetorical Analysis

The most successful advertisements often blend a series of rhetorical devices to maximize their impact upon their target audience. This is exemplified in a commercial called Commander, which advertises the Audi R8 sports car. Ethos is displayed through the prestige of astronauts, pathos is used to elicit feelings of patriotism, nostalgia, and empathy, and logos is conveyed through comparisons of the sports car to a spaceship.

The commercial starts by showing several shots of an empty home office. There are photographs of astronauts wearing their space suits, framed newspaper articles, certificates, medals, and models of space shuttles, moon landers and space capsules. An old photograph of a smiling, young astronaut is followed by

The Audi R8 costs over 160,000 USD, and as a result their main demographic is older individuals who have saved up enough to afford it. In order to attract this older audience, Audi tries to create a positive emotional connection between their product and the memories of consumers. By having the father be an astronaut, they plan to target anybody who remembers the Apollo moon landings which occurred from 1969-1972. The commercial also creates nostalgia is through the song Starman by David Bowie, which was also released in 1972. The song may have been purposefully selected in order to exploit the grief of consumers, because the commercial debuted less than one month after Bowie’s death. This grief ends up making the commercial much more memorable and emotionally

Spacecraft employ cutting-edge technology, are meticulously designed, and are extremely fast. In this way Audi wants the customer to think that their sports car is state of the art, and radically better than competing products. Although very few words are shown on-screen, the company does take time to brag that the Audi R8’s top speed is 205 mph. As most consumers do not know how to picture a speed this fast, they end up visualizing the car travelling at the speed of a spacecraft, even though spacecraft are faster by a few orders of magnitude. The commercial also tries to connect space exploration to driving an Audi R8. Doing this makes the product seem more exciting because Audi is suggesting that their sports car will be able to take the driver anywhere. The connections between their sports car and space craft is a narrative further pushed by the commercials slogan “Choosing the moon brings out the best in us” because it implies that setting lofty goals like landing on the moon and purchasing an expensive car are both in our best