In the Doritos 2016 Super Bowl Ad. The thirty second commercial begins with a woman and her husband at an ultrasound appointment. As ultrasound appointments are very important and can be an emotional moment, the woman directs her attention towards the baby on the screen. She is transfixed by the image of her unborn child, until she turns her head to her husband, and sees him snacking on Doritos. The remainingtwenty seconds of the commercial consist of her husband continuing,  un-phased by her glares,  to instigate and tease the baby with the Doritos, as he waves the chip over the ultrasound, causing the baby to kick around inside his wife. Ultimately, the ad is trying to use an absurd and humorous scenario to get across to the audience just how good Doritos are. The Doritos appeals to its audience through humor and a combination of ethos, pathos, and logos.

In order for a company to air a commercial during the Super Bowl, it must have the means to pay the millions of dollars it costs for just a short ad. In addition, the companies that usually air ads during the Super Bowl are well known, established, and successful. This is why the Doritos commercial is already a credible source long before the ad even plays as Doritos is a well-known, established, and successful company. This is the ethos of the argument. The name brand, and all things associated with the Doritos company makes for a credible source that convinces an audience that it is a legitimate company. 

The first ten seconds of the ad is a great example of how the pathos of the argument comes into play. What the pathos of an argument does is it generates an emotional response or appeal. In this case, the setting plays a big part in generating an emotional response towards the ad. Although not everyone can directly relate to being in the position of the woman in the commercial, most people can relate to it in some other way. Anyone who has ever had children or knows someone who has children can understand and relate to the situation that the woman in the commercial is experiencing and in doing so creates some king of emotional response. In this way, the commercial does a great job of targeting a wide and diverse audience of both men and women, and people of all ages. Although the ad chooses to combine an emotional and heart-warming setting with humor, it works well. Especially because the ad not only generates feelings associated with an ultrasound appointment, but it creates laughter as well, which is a totally different type of emotional response towards the ad, but it works well for the Doritos company because no matter which emotional response the audience has towards the commercial, the point is that the audience is emotionally invested in their company at that moment in some capacity.

The final piece of what makes this Doritos ad a great rhetorical argument is the logos of the argument. The logos of any rhetorical argument is the logical piece that causes the audience to make sense of the commercial, and have it make clear and logical sense. In this case, the husband is holding up a Doritos chip over his wife's stomach, and in doing so, causes the baby to gravitate to wherever the Doritos chip moves to. The husband is obviously amused by it, however his wife is not. In the final ten seconds of the commercial, the wife grabs the chip from her husband and launches it across the room. There is a split second pause, and then the image of the baby vanishes from ultrasound screen, as the baby was to go wherever the Doritos went. The ad ends with screaming and the woman about to give birth. Although this is not at all a realistic or logical scenario, it is not necessary for this ad to be logical. Although the logos of an argument is without a doubt equally as important as the ethos and pathos, The Doritos ad uses its creative license to choose to leave out the logos part of the argument and instead replace it with humor, which in this case works.

The 2016 Doritos Super Bowl commercial is a good example of a rhetorical argument because of the combination of ethos, logos, and pathos, in addition to its use of humor. Although the entirety of the commercial was unrealistic, absurd and annoying. The purpose of any commercial is to capture an audience's attention and to generate an emotional response, no matter negative or positive. Because attention is attention. I did not like the Doritos ad, it annoyed me and I did not find it funny, However I did find myself paying extra attention to it and even laughed because of how absurd and ridiculous it was. Although I did not enjoy watching it, I watched it nonetheless, so the ad served its purpose, I suppose. 
