My Dad Is A Liar Rhetorical Analysis

My Dad is a Liar

Marketers have the job of creating new and interesting ways to compel and sway the public to a certain product, or train of thought. One of the most practical ways to do this is through advertising. Marketers can hit a plethora of appeals through music, images, and background to create whatever effect they want to achieve. Commercials and other advertisements can be taken in many different ways, but will always have a central goal and point trying to be made all the way across it’s audience. The marketing team for MetLife did exactly that through symbolism, irony, tone change and pathos. Through all of these techniques MetLife broke many emotional barriers with their tear jerking commercial “My Dad is a Liar.”

The main goal for any marketer is to hit a specific target audience to try to touch or motivate in the direction that the company wants those selected few to go. The general audience targeted are parents who have loved ones and are trying to further them in education. This is the broad spectrum of the audience but,

You can see the tone change around the middle of the commercial. It goes from a happy and peppy theme to a dark reality of poverty and struggle. The tone change is queued with the line, “but… My Dad is a liar.” After this the viewer sees the moral dilemma that the commercial is trying to portray. After the tone change the commercial no longer focuses on all the things the father is giving the daughter but instead all of the things that the father is doing to give her those things. Without the necessary tone change the commercial would have no real effect, and wouldn’t show how special a kids education truly is and how hard it is to come by. This makes the viewer realize what it takes to provide a child's future, and even more so than that, it shows the bond that sacrifice can create between a family and