Chris Hedges Rhetorical Analysis

Did you know that the average person sees about 5,000 ads a day! That is about 5 a minute! In this new consumer market companies are constantly fighting one another for customers and looking for any angle that can make them stand out. This means that companies need to make their advertisements memorable because if they don’t they will quickly be forgotten about and the ad would be a waste of money. However, once they have your attention then they can make their pitch and hopefully sell you on buying new insurance or a politicians vote. Chris Hedges is right– in this growing consumer culture the ability to get and hold an audience's attention is often more important than what is actually being sold to you– the ability to weave an appeared intimacy with your audience can make or break the pitch. …show more content…
In order for companies to make money and gain new customers they must establish credibility– ethos– and the best way to do this is with proven tests. These results often leave much to be desired, so companies prey on their audience’s lack of statistical knowledge and skew their results to make themselves stand apart from their competitors. Some of the most common ways this is done is by exaggerating the graph to make their product seem far better than the competition, and upon closer examination shows they actually very comparable. Another common way to skew data is to test it under desirable conditions or to test the product multiple times and only express the results of the best test. Even though these tactics are, simply put, deceptive they are nevertheless effective in convincing consumers to choose their product or else there would be no reason for so many companies play this misleading numbers