Visual Rhetorical Analysis Bmw

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Our lives are influenced by visual rhetoric on a daily basis. Rhetorical components go unnoticed unless one is intently searching for them. Companies carefully work visual rhetoric into advertisements and use it to their advantage to lure in potential consumers. The German car company, Bayerische Motoren Werke, or more commonly known as “BMW”, uses a clip from NBC’s Today Show in 1994. In the clip, the characters are discussing the newfangled idea of the internet. BMW uses nostalgia of the 1990’s as bait to attract an older audience who remember the ‘90’s and when the internet was a new invention. BMW uses the rhetorical elements of character, dialogue, and focus to sell their product. The characters in the short clip from 1994 in BMW’s ad, …show more content…

The dialogue and language are carefully crafted in this commercial to illustrate that BMW’s new car is as big, as new, and as futuristic as the internet was to people in 1994. Gumbel, one of the two main characters ask “what is i3 anyway?” just like he did in the flashback about the internet 21 years prior. BMW uses this parallel as a comedic way of stating their slogan “big ideas take a little getting used to”. The dialogue is also designed to make the audience reminisces about simpler times in the early 1990’s. A memory is then connected to the commercial, thus forming a bond among company and consumer. We find it funny that Gumbel reads the web address and completely leaves out the “dot” before saying “com”. Although humor is not a core element of rhetoric, it is useful to the dialogue in this commercial. It helps express the idea that just like the internet, BMW’s new car is just the beginning of many amazing breakthroughs to come in the car industry and we know very little of the vast advances on the way. Gumbel asks, in both the past and the present, for clarification but is still unsure about the situation after an answer is given. It just further suggests BMW’s point that big ideas just take a little getting used to. Gumbel is not the only one in the dark here, Couric tries to decipher the new information that is being dumped in her lap. She is told that the car was built using wind and she …show more content…

The focus of the camera in the flashback to 1994 shows us that it is an actual shot from the 1990’s due to the poor quality of the image. The characters are also sitting in the same relative order in the car as they were in the set of the show. This similarity is on purpose. The television show seating arrangement is recreated in the car and is paired with similar dialogue to compare the two situations and realize that they are very similar. The use of focus here is much like the use of dialogue. The first shot of the car is when the car is coming to a stop at the stoplight. We get a quick view of the sleek black and white exterior. The only other time that we get to see the outside of the car is after the dialogue has finished and the light at the stoplight turns from red to green, and they proceed to drive away. The colors of the written text in the commercial match the colors of the car. The colors are crisp and inverse of each other, making them jut out. Besides the text and the car matching, the colors also match the color of the companies logo. These colors are carefully chosen to make the car look sleek, elegant and pleasing to the

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