Dorritos Commercial Analysis
Great Dane Doritos Commercial The commercial I choose to do my paper on was a Doritos commercial from Super Bowl XLII. In a Doritos ‘commercial, a man working in his garden becomes suspicious when he sees his Great Dane burying what appears to be the collar of a missing cat. Next thing the man knows he’s staring eye to eye with the pooch, who’s realized his master has caught him getting rid of evidence of a heinous crime. To buy his silence the dog slips his owner a bag of Doritos with a note attached reading ‘You didn’t see nuthin.” The man acknowledges the dog with a smile of agreement and it shows the Doritos logo. The commercial’s punch line comes when the man takes the Doritos inside and happily devours the bag. As he finishes the bag and is scourging for crumbs his wife from another room says ‘Honey, have you seen the cat?’ The man from the kitchen looks up at the sliding glass door to see the Great Dane standing on the other side with another bag of Doritos and says “Nope”. The commercial then ends. Ivor Armstrong Richards was a man who had an interest in language and its meanings but he was not yet awakened until teaming up with Charles Kay Ogden. They both ended up writing a book called “The Meaning of Meaning”. The two men where influenced by Francis Bacon. Bacon believed that language functions as a potential barrier. This then led them to view rhetoric as a study of misunderstanding and its remedies. This then led to the creation of the Semantic Triangle. Every corner helps lead to the process of meaning. The right hand corner of the triangle is the symbol which is an arbitrary label given to a phenomenon. The bottom left corner is the referent which refers to objects that are the item in reality. At the top of the triangle you have the reference which indicates a realm of memory where recollections of past experiences and contexts occur. In the commercial I chose to pursue the symbol would be the Doritos logo/name. Everyone knows that