Old Spice Ad - Logan Smith

The advertisement I chose is from the company Old Spice and goes hand in hand with a commercial I’ve seen essentially every day since its debut a few years ago. In the ad, the Old Spice Man (Isaiah Mustafa, a pro football player… thus exercising ethos by using him as such an advocate of the product!) is sitting on a horse indicating that you too can smell like a man if you simply use Old Spice body wash. These advertisements from Old Spice never fail to utilize humor to get a point across, and by utilizing this tool of rhetoric that accesses the consumer’s emotions, Old Spice successfully employs pathos. The ad itself draws a sense of disbelief and downright comedy simply because of the layout of the ad and the total non-sequitur of everything that Mustafa does, I mean… he’s riding a horse on the beach. While it is funny on several different levels (the television commercials follow along the lines of the Mustafa doing several things that seem impossible, i.e., going from a horse to the beach to riding a horse backward… there’s a link to one of the videos below), a point they never fail to make is that the viewer could do all of these crazy and extraordinary things if only he starts the day with Old Spice body wash. A phrase and point used by Old Spice is that Mustafa is ‘the man your man could smell like,’ which therefore includes females in the audience. While I’m sure Old Spice doesn’t expect their customers to try to go ride horses backward after seeing this commercial, a point they do make and that they make well is that Old Spice is manly, and if you can’t do all of those things, at least you can smell like a man.

http://oldspice.com/en-US/videos.aspx?id=owGykVbfgUE&page=3