Hello and welcome to the Itsy Bitsy Podcast hosted by myself, Liz Tapia.

Joined with me today in the audience is my mom! This is just another way for me
to annoy her.
ok roll the intro music!

[intro music]

OK so jumping into it:

why is it that whenever we get a fortune cookie and it’s something bad, we always
think “oh this is not for me” but when it’s something good like “a good fortune
awaits you, you think oh word this for me forsure.

[thesis]

Direct TV’s “Get Rid of Cable” commercial series claims that having a less than
adequate TV carrier will cause unneeded chaos in ones life, but what Direct TV
fails to question is the amount of influence a bad experience with a TV company
carries.

Direct TV uses pathos to create a slippery slope fallacy by showing tragic events
that instill fear to distract the audience of logos and ethos.

Direct TV’s “Get Rid of Cable” shows how companies will wrongfully profit off of
people’s stress through extreme assumptions and guaranteeing a false sense of
security.

[background]

First aired in 2014 and have since released many different versions.

Direct TV is infamously known for these commercials just because of how

ridiculous they are.

[audience]

who are they trying to reach?

I think they’re trying to reach middle class America only because are their
visuals are very average.

no luxury or poverty.
By doing this, Direct TV is able to seem empathetic to the everyday struggles of
the average person and promises to provide a false sense of security that will
take away one of life’s many stresses.
[next idea]

In their commercials, pathos plays the biggest role in distracting the audience
from the larger goal and true intentions of Direct TV.

Pathos is used to establish emotion; by appealing to a persons’ sense of emotion,

it is easier to dictate how they feel about a person, place or thing.

In the commercial, a man becomes so frustrated with his carrier’s customer

service that he needs to “blow off steam” causing him to injure himself
They are aware of the problems that most people encounter when dealing with
customer service or just being frustrated in general.

It is common knowledge that overpaying or spending often comes with a feeling

of defeat; Direct TV strategically uses this commonly felt emotion of frustration
to inadequately guarantee that their services do the opposite.

People feel strongly about how they spend their time and money that Direct TV
uses ones fear to their benefit.

[next idea]

Direct TV evokes emotion of fear as they lead their audience to believe that any
other TV carrier will end in chaos.

In order to instill this fear, the advertisers include life threatening situations
despite it being ridiculous.

For example, in one commercial a man is seen falling through a glass ceiling,
another is seen being quarantined after catching a tropical disease and another is
seen being left for dead in a ditch.

All of this is said to be dictated as a result of choosing the wrong TV carrier.

People might resort to switching out of fear that Direct TV could be correct, in the
sense that they might decide on the wrong carrier.

Myself, when i saw that roadside ditch commercial I was never afraid of waking
up in a roadside ditch.
I could end up in a roadside ditch… TWICE.

[next idea]
By predicting a series of events without absolute certainty, Direct TV fails to
acknowledge the hole in their logic.

Slippery Slope fallacies which is when an argument leads to one conclusion

without questioning the chain of events leading up it.

In the commercial, they assume that people will become depressed by overpaying
for a service or that a bad phone call with customer service will make them angry
enough to become violent but in reality, most adults don’t let those experiences
carry much influence on their day

Even if used comedically, extreme assumptions about an audience are used to

help build a weak argument that lack evidence to reinforce the claim.

[next idea]

By avoiding logos and ethos, one can easily question the argument and false
promises that the company has made.

By avoiding to appeal logically, the company cannot dismantle their false reality
that they have created in their scenario.

[conclusion]

By titling their commercial “Get Rid of Cable” they establish their superiority to
other companies as well as make assumptions about other carriers and their
services.

The irony falls in that the company appears to be pro-consumer but really they
are in need of the capital that consumers bring in for corporate America.
This throughly shows how a company can mislead audiences if they are unaware
of a company’s underlying intentions.

It is despite Direct TVs promise to eliminate bad service for the consumer that
one can see how they are similar to other companies.

All in all the only the people that switch bc of commercials are the same ones that
Harriette Tubman and Aunt Jamima were the same person.

if you take anything from this its that the only one dumb enough to switch
carriers because of a commercial is Trump.

Ok thanks for listening bye.

I was used to think
one day am i gonna go absolutely mad and blame me problems on cable.