The television commercial is the body nutritional needs enhancer advertisement, which is a product essentially produced by the Tianshi company, a multinational known to produce other nutritional component foods and additives. The commercial runs occasionally on the Super Sport African edition of the World Wrestling federation. The product being advertised on this program edition is the ‘Nutrient drop’, a ‘natural’ nutritional component that essentially targets sports active individuals as it claims to result in good body building enhancement results. A fallacy is essentially an expression of an abstract reality of events through use of images, speech, and other visual and action components as a tool to propagate an element of intentional misrepresentation of facts, in order to exploit the human common belief of ‘to see is to believe.
’ (Emerald 67). In this television commercial, the announcer who is a nutritionists uses the advantage of the wrestling scene to build an image of body building capability during which she brings it into focus that most of these capabilities have been enabled through the utilization of the product, ‘nutrient drop.’ Viewers are therefore encouraged to disregard the utilization of common body toners containing lethal contaminants that could potentially affect human health. The fallcy in this commercial is the generalization of the advertisement to the common wrestling fan. The fallacy is therefore, overgeneralization especially through the expression of the massive body gain after using the products. The essence of the advertisement needs to essentially revolve around the promotion of sportsmanship as opposed to the common fan out there, who regardless of the sport is less interested in the bodybuilding elements.
By overgeneralization, the advertisement has strategically included all viewers as users of the discouraged products, in this case the body toners containing harmful health contents.Another aspect of overgeneralization is seen with regard to the message component of the advertisement. This is because the advertisement potentially lacks a segmented framework in which it addresses a single issue or concern (Emerald 68). In this case, by bringing into focus the aspects regarding of health contaminants, this partly digresses from the main message, which is to promote the body building product. This therefore introduces an element of multiplicity of meanings derived from the advert a factor which potential results in the definition of overgeneralization. It also fails to segment the target population by generalizing all ages and sexes.
This trait further gives the advert a sweeping mentality in that it tends to fundamentallly generalize the advert focusing on the point of view of participatory elements, which is essentially important in a running television commercial. Ordinarily, an advert of this nature would naturally except viewers of a certain ‘calibre’ to access the benefits being promoted. However, in this case, the advert fails to establish this fact giving an overgeneralization description. This failure to identify a directly beneficiary population further enhances the fallacy of overgeneralization (Emerald, 68).Moreover, the television commercial also tends to exhibit an aspect of bandwagon fallacy, since it appears to ride its popularity based on the increasing popularity for body building products especially in focusing on the American market. Bandwagon fallacy essentially occurs when a current theme tends to ride on a common existing notion of an event associated with a certain trait or people (Emerald, 69).
Therefore, the advert appears to be building its potential by exploiting the ‘bandwagon’ mentality attributed to wrestling viewers and the fact that since wrestlers naturally have well built bodies, this aspect also primarily applies to their fans. This notion gives it an unfair advantage by exploiting the common association with wrestlers. The advert therefore serves to bring out the contextual occurrences of the fallacies of overgeneralization and bandwagon.
