The AT&T commercial never fails to have my family and me glued to the screen because it's so adorable, but as I continue to learn about logical fallacies, I have to begin to question: how effective is the ad? Of course, the commercial changes every so often, and normally, it is the same actor sitting with a group of four or five very young children in a classroom at a table. The whole idea of the commercial is that switching to AT&T is not complicated, and neither is having AT&T. What doesn't make sense, though, is the fact that the commercial takes the idea from little children, and then transposes it to the oh-so-powerful phone company. Although extremely adorable and occasionally humorous, it is hard to take this commercial and say it's effective. This fallacy would be called false authority, because this would make better sense if it was a toy store company or even an ad for juice boxes or something more immature, but making it about a phone company doesn't make much sense. Another example of this fallacy would be celebrities who have nothing to do with a certain product, being advertised with it or even advertising it themselves.
Rhetorically analyzing the AT&T commercial, though, the commercial does have it's humorous moments, and the children on it are usually extremely adorable. It leaves me wondering if the commercial is scripted. In this way, it is extremely effective because it definitely catches the audience's attention while also keeping them interested. I'm starting to understand that this applies to many commercials, in the sense that even though many ads and commercials contain logical fallacies, these logical fallacies may actually help contribute to the commercial. While straying a bit from the commercials purpose, it may keep the audience entertained, and give them something to remember by the end of it.
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