Commercial Analysis

Commercial Analysis Assignment

For this assignment, you will want to choose a television commercial or video advertisement that would appear on You Tube, or a website. The commercial or advertisement needs to be for a product or service. You will NOT want to use movie trailers or ads for other television shows. Please choose a commercial that is recent. If you do not watch live television and have no access to commercials, please message me for some options.

If possible, you will want to watch this commercial more than once. If you have a DVR, record some television time and use one of the commercials you see there. If you are watching live TV, maybe record a commercial with your phone. With You Tube or On-Demand television, you often see the same commercial over and over, so that could work. You can also find many ads posted on You Tube for viewing, particularly the Super Bowl commercials. If you cannot watch the commercial multiple times, just try to be prepared by reading over the criteria for this assignment ahead of time and take good notes right after you watch it.

After reading the document entitled “How to Analyze a Television Commercial” and watching the video “Rhetorical Analysis of a Commercial” (found in the “Readings for Essay #2” folder in the “Course Readings and Visuals” area), do your own analysis of the commercial you have chosen.

You will want to consider the following things:

· Setting

· Lighting

· Music (or other sound effects)

· Casting (Does this commercial depend on a celebrity? Is the casting diverse racially? Does this show only a certain gender or specific age group?)

· Dialogue / Text

· Editing speed / camera angles

· The intended audience for the advertisement

· When / where this would likely air (what TV channel, special occasion, etc.)

Some of the items listed above will be really important to analyzing your commercial and others will not. You can also consider some of the questions on the “How to Analyze a Television Commercial” page.

After you have some notes on these items in the commercial, you will write up your analysis in MLA format. Your analysis should be at least ½ page long, but a strong analysis will probably be longer. The goal of this assignment is to tell us why/how this commercial reaches its potential audience, what it wants people to think/feel, and how this may or may not persuade people to buy the product. Your written analysis will be similar to the video you watched that does the rhetorical analysis of a commercial. Please note that I don’t expect you to go into that much detail, but be sure to analyze the commercial, rather than just summarizing what occurs or what is present in the ad.

Be sure to introduce the ad at the beginning of your analysis. Tell your reader what type of product the commercial was selling and where you found it. You also want to be sure to proofread carefully before submitting.