While the Super Bowl is known for wacky and sometimes outright insane commercials, this year audiences were presented with an unprecedented level of odd yet amusing advertisements.  This year's most absurd advertisement came in the form of a "Puppy-Monkey-Baby", which was used as a tool to advertise the Kickstart Energy Drink made by Pepsico.  This Puppy-Monkey-Baby looks exactly as it sounds, a puppy's head attached to a monkey's body with the legs of a baby.  While many see this odd creation of a character to be just an amusing creature to make people keep their eyes on the television, it is actually much deeper than that.  What Pepsico geniusly created was a creature that linked three things that most humans love  and linked it to their product.  By using ethos, pathos, and logos, Pepsico takes three highly liked being, puppies, monkeys, and babies, and combined them resulting in a super creature that plays on your emotions and almost instinctively makes the viewer like Puppy-Monkey-Baby.  They use this to show that if you like puppies, monkeys, and babies, and Puppy-Monkey-Baby likes Kickstart Energy, by default you too will like Kickstart Energy drink.

The commercial starts off with three men sitting on the couch questioning whether they have enough energy to go out that night.  Just from that small amount of information it is clear that the target audience for this product which is yet to be shown up to this point is most likely for people around the age of 18 to about 35.  This makes sense because as the product is soon shown, energy drinks are usually shown to people of that age group.  Younger kids do not tend to drink it and neither do older adults.  The Puppy-Monkey-Baby quickly makes his appearance and the use of pathos quickly comes into play.  The creature plays on your emotions, the puppy face mixed with the monkey body and the baby legs creates an odd but almost cute character in a way.  Pepsico does a great job here because just as you become attached to the character that they have made, they introduce their product and those emotional feelings that you had towards the Puppy-Monkey-Baby are now linked to the Kickstart Energy drink that is being introduced in the commercial.  This simple yet clever idea of using a creature that almost everyone enjoys and showing that he enjoys the product, results in the audience wanting to also enjoy the product.  The pathos appeal used by Pepsico in this commercial was clear and works well.  

Pepsico, who makes Mountain Dew and the featured product in this commercial, Kickstarter, is a well known company throughout the world with a wide variety of products and is also one of the largest companies in the world.  The commercial makes sure to to make it clear that Kickstart Energy drink is a Mountain Dew product.  This where Pepsico's use of ethos comes out.  They use their own popularity as way to sell their product.  They know that just throwing in the name Mountain Dew will show that this energy drink is associated with one of the most highly recognized sodas and beverage companies in the world.  They say that people do not just want to buy a product, they want to buy the brand and this is exactly what Pepsico is doing.  They are catering to this need of buying a product straight from a well know brand and company.  It is common for a person to purchase one product over another just because one of them is made by a more well know brand.  Even if both product are completely equal, the power of the the brand name can cause the person to choose the more well known item.  This is seen here in this commercial as Pepsico makes sure to show that the Kickstart Energy drink is a member of the Mountain Dew brand.  They have no shame in displaying their credibility for their product in plain sight throughout the commerical.

Lastly and possibly the most obvious of the rhetorical devices used in this commercial, logos is seen throughout the advertisement and also plays a large role in selling the Kickstart Energy product.  As most people know, energy drinks are known to work, some more than others, but for the most part energy drinks work.  What the audience is able to assume just using logic is that if this well known brand (Mountain Dew), is making an energy drink than most likely this energy drink will be superior to other energy drink because of the fact that it is made by such a widely known and consumed company.  This assumption is backed up by the Puppy-Monkey-Baby also showing that he loves the energy drink product.

By the end of the commercial the audience is left staring at the television screen wondering what kind of creature just instilled this idea that the Kickstart Energy drink is superior to other energy drinks.  What many people did not realize is that you played right into the Puppy-Monkey-Baby's gameplan.  You were brought in by the emotional game that he played with you.  He got you to like him and therefore like the product that he is selling through pathos.  Logos and ethos are also present through the advertisement through the use of the brand name being used as way to sell the product.  The Puppy-Monkey-Baby creation did its job of pulling the audience in, keeping them there, and pitching a product to the audience all with the help of these rhetorical devices dropped throughout the commercial.

