Copywriting Lighting Sounds Exciting

Copywriting sounds like a very interesting career field. If you were able to work for any company, which one would you choose? What business market would be the most challenging to copywrite for? What specific college classes are most critical in developing copywriting skills? With virtually all consumer products containing Spanish writing, do you predict Spanish becoming a preffered job skill for future copywriting jobs?

Media Kit for ESPN

http://www.espncms.com/index2.aspx?id=287

Toyota is Fatally Reliable

Toyota has been gaining infamy lately with their sticking accelerator that has resulted in 19 fatalities in the past decade. The main defect has been with a down curved accelerator which allows the floor mat to be pushed on top of the accelerator locking the pedal in the downward position. This defect has resulted in over 3.8 million recalls. Another defect has arisen with the new 2010 Prius, it's braking software has a glitch preventing its brakes from engaging immediately. This additional defect will result in an estimated 8 million recalls of the Prius world-wide.

The Toyota ad seemed to use more striking visual elements to appeal to the audience then rhetoric. It starts with nostalgic piano music and a vintage black and white photo of several dealerships. It begins by stating "For over 50 years, providing you with safe, reliable, high quality vehicles has been our first priority." This one sentence effectively acknowledges Toyotas strengths and covers some of it's weaknesses. The price of a Toyota is considerably higher then other car manufacturers which must carry a justifiebly reason for paying this premium. Secondly, it is an imported car preventing it from being considered a domestic all American car. This issue has become increasingly relevant in the consumers mind due to the recession. After all, the auto bail out has made all American tax payers financially vested in the success of GM and Ford. It adresses this deficiency again shortly after. First it acknowledges it's recent decline in quality, it then says "That's why 172,000 Toyota and dealership employees are working around the clock". While it says this it shows various American people of both genders of varying race carrying out different jobs and maintenence to vehicles. This would allude to the fact that these "172,000 employees" are American but this is not true, Toyota employs roughly 36,000 employees in America. The bulk of Toyota workers are employed in Japan and yet they don't show a single clip of a Japanese factory with all Japanese workers.

The final statement in the video is "We are working around the clock to ensure we build vehicles of the highest quality (pause) to restore your faith (pause) in our company". This deliberate pacing helps to build a dramatic affect and keeps the viewer engaged. The latter half of the sentence might also carry subconcious religious conotations. This might seem to be consipiratorial to suspect such a thing but with the intensive amount of psychological research and technology applied to marketing these days, I wouldn't rule it out.

Obama OutFoxed

As part of our homework in Political Science class we were assigned to watch the State of the Union Address. I felt that the speech was fairly well delivered. I was skeptical that some of the issues, like giving tax cuts to business that don’t ship jobs overseas, would honestly be addressed. I feel, being a union member,that he was just paying lip service to the unions that lobbied in his favor. Other then that his messages were on issues that any president would be required to address regardless of who was in office.

For my rhetoric article I decided to look at was Fox News response to the state of the union address. I knew despite their claim of being “fair and balanced” that they’d be against Obama, but it was disappointing how contentious a tone they used against him. The title of the article was “Obama’s Sorry State of the Union Speech”. The first sentence read as follows “President Obama’s State of the Union address was an incoherent, disorganized, and most regrettably defiant mess of a speech.” The title and first sentence set the tone for the rest of the article. It was a strong pathos statement that would hopefully be supported by logos in the body of the article.

The article goes on to criticize numerous parts of his speech. In summary they attack him for 3 million job losses, mentioning scientific evidence of climate change, criticizing the Supreme Court, and setting a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq. Many of the accusations in the article were very misleading. One such criticism was stated as follows “He referred to himself in the speech more that 100 times. And made absolutely absurd demands that appeared to be almost dishonest.” The first sentence isn’t really a legitimate argument but more of an implied criticism of Obama being self-centered. Is referring to yourself a bad thing? If it is, I’m guilty of same thing because I’ve referenced myself numerous times in this article. The state of the union is a speech given by and centered predominantly on the president so his self-references are justified. The second sentence is a criticism that contradicts itself. It uses words with strong pathos that appear to make a logos statement but by the end of the sentence it nullifies any absolute claim. What is “almost dishonest” supposed to mean? Bordering on lying? That might make sense if the following sentences cited specifically he was “almost dishonest” about, but it doesn’t. The following two sentences read as follows, “. But noticeably absent in his speech was any mention of how he handled the mirandizing of a terrorist captured after a failed terror attack on Christmas Day. -- The fourth such attack on our nation in just his first year in office. So it’s original assertion that Obama was almost dishonest isn’t backed up by anything he was “almost dishonest” about.

Its ending statement was that “It was messy, incoherent, disorganized, and most regrettably defiant. Which I guess when you think of it, defines the state of our union pretty well.” I don’t think any news station should take such a one-sided view of an issue and still claim to be “fair and balanced”. The media is licensed channels with the rational of serving the people by being a fact-checking device to inform the people of what’s going on in our country. I don’t trust either side of the aisle but I trust Fox and the other four media conglomerates even less.