As the internet grows to become more vital to everyday life, the competition between the networks providing access to it grows as well. Verizon and T-Mobile – two of the largest internet service providers – are examples of this intensifying rivalry and actively portray their competition through the universal medium of television; one instance being a T-Mobile advertisement aired during the 50th NFL Superbowl. The commercial starts with a mocking of Verizon’s advertisement, which leads into Steve Harvey’s vehemently expressing T-Mobile’s superiority over Verizon, and then wraps up with even more statistical and social whiplash. By utilizing both artistic and logical rhetoric – including imagery, allusion, and appeals to Logos and Ethos – T-Mobile persuades Verizon users to switch to its network. In order …show more content…
Next, Steve Harvey enters the scene as a celebrity endorser, humorously referring to his index cards as he apologizes for ‘being wrong again.’ He then points out that T-Mobile’s LTE coverage has actually doubled in the past year, consequently matching and surpassing Verizon’s own. After reading the card, Harvey comically announces that he ‘wasn’t wrong this time,’ and scrambles off the scene. Steve Harvey’s endorsement serves as an allusion to his infamous faux pas at the 2015 Miss Universe pageant, where he misread his index card and declared the incorrect winner. This device accomplishes two things: it attracts the audience’s attention through witty, alluded humor, and it appeals to Logos – which follows up on T-Mobile’s previous claim on Verizon’s inaccuracy with data, thus establishing credibility and unveiling T-Mobile’s LTE superiority to persuade the audience to switch. Finally, a narrator commands firmly for the audience to ‘join the millions that switched,’ while ‘#BALLOGIZE’ is depicted in the background. Both the narrator’s statement and the text are artistically and logically presented in order for the rhetoric to have the most