Got Milk Rhetorical Analysis Essay

You probably do not notice it, but everywhere you turn you see an advertisement of some sort. You see them on billboards as you are driving in your car, you see them on the television when you are watching TV, and you see them in magazines and newspapers when you are reading. In all of the advertisements you see every day almost all of them include some kind of rhetorical devices. Rhetoric is the art of using language effectively so as to persuade or influence others. Most advertisements include rhetorical devices because it has been proven that “advertisement that incorporate rhetorical devices perform better than advertisements that do not for both measurement of recall and persuasion” (Tom, 42). I will be analyzing two “Got Milk” advertisements.

“Got Milk?” is an “American advertising campaign encouraging the consumption of cow’s milk, which was created by the advertising agency Goodby Sliverstein & Partners for the California Milk Processors Board in 1993 and later licensed for use by milk processors and dairy farmers. It has been running since October 24, 1993” (Holt). In 1995, the Slogan “Got Milk?” was licensed to the National Milk Processor Board to use their celebrity print ads. These advertisements are interesting because they are trying to sell the same thing but the way they go about selling it is very

I choose the very first Got Milk commercial for my second advertisement that ran five days after the start of got milk. The commercial features a hapless history buff, played by Sean Whalen, making a peanut butter sandwich. He takes a big bite of the sandwich before receiving a call to answer a radio station’s ten thousand dollar trivia question, “Who shot Alexander Hamilton in that famous dual?”. It shows the man’s apartment to be a private museum to the dual, packed with artifacts such as the gun, bullet, cloths, and portraits of the two with their names on a plaque below them. He answers correctly, but because his month is full of peanut butter his answer was unintelligible to the radio host. He tries to wash it down by grabbing his milk carton, but there was no milk left in it and he ran out of time. After the radio host hung up the phone he looked sadly down at the phone and said the correct answer again sadly then it boldly displayed “Got Milk?” on a black screen. (Aaron