The company Hulu is in an extremely competitive field. Hulu is stacked up market-wise against power companies such as Netflix and other live TV and movie streaming providers. Essentially, all of these companies provide the same service, to deliver streamed TV shows on any media device in the customer’s home. This commercial from Hulu attempts to reach the average TV lover and convince them that Hulu is a great way to watch TV.
Although overall this ad was effective, it does contain a few fallacies that detract from the overall message. The first fallacy that the advertisement has in the false authority fallacy. In the beginning, Alec Baldwin says that he’s credible for talking about TV because he is a TV star. However, Baldwin is not in fact credible because he has clear ulterior motives, such as gaining popularity for his own TV shows. Baldwin is just a star on TV, he does not necessarily watch TV so although he is credible in the acting realm; the watching, not so much. This Hulu ad may have been able to avoid that fallacy if they had used a TV fanatic to talk about why Hulu is great for streaming.
Not only that, but this Hulu ad is also based largely on the claim that many people believe TV will turn your brain to mush. The ad then uses this claim to create a satirical promotion of Hulu that shows that it is good that human’s brains become mush using streaming because the people at Hulu are aliens. Although entertaining and amusing, this claim falls to the ground if the audience does not agree that TV has the capacity to turn one’s brain to mush. Yes, this fallacy may be having to do with something extremely fictional but the difference in effectiveness of the ad if you don’t go along with the premise, even a fictional one, is substantial. So, although this advertisement is effective in that it is memorable and creative, fallacies take away from its credibility.
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