“When you have cable and your picture freezes, you get irritable. When you get irritable, your work suffers. When your work suffers, the wrong man is convicted. When the wrong man is convicted, he has time to think. When he has time to think, he thinks about you—a lot. And when he thinks about you a lot, your house explodes. Don’t have your house explode. Get rid of cable and upgrade to DIRECTV.” (DIRECTV Marketing)
Summary of Video: This man seems to have a series of bad events that have little to no correlation, yet the video implies that his house explodes because he doesn’t have DIRECTV. It starts with his cable freezing and creates a chain of increasingly extreme events until his house eventually explodes.
You might find yourself in a situation where you are told that one event is going to end your life or completely change your life! It may be a slippery slope. You have probably heard that doing drugs will destroy your life. The same idea is used with not having DIRECTV in this commercial. Either outcome could happen, but the decisions have very different possibilities and chances of leading to those results. Having DIRECTV might have saved your morning from a frozen TV screen, but your bad day at work could still happen. A slippery slope occurs when someone claims that one event will lead to a chain of other events, even though the beginning and end results are very unlikely to actually correlate. It directly plays to peoples emotions trying to scare people into buying DIRECTV subscription. They could have said that there is a super small chance these things could happen without DIRECTV but it would have been less funny and less effective marketing.
Slippery slopes are an easy way to convince people to do something because they make a small decision seem like it will have a much bigger consequence. This works especially well in marketing because an advertisement doesn’t necessarily have to prove that the events will happen; it just has to make you think about the possibility. In the DIRECTV commercial, not having DIRECTV somehow ends with your house exploding. Could it happen? Sure, but is it likely? Probably not. That extreme possibility is what makes the commercial funny while also making it a good marketing tactic.
Marketing a game using this logical fallacy could include saying that not having the game will make you uncool, then everyone at school will hate you, and eventually even your mom will hate you. Could it happen? Sure, but is it likely? Probably not. When you see a slippery slope in marketing, you should ask yourself whether the two things actually correlate or if the advertiser is just connecting unrelated events to persuade you or make the advertisement funny.
Now that your house hasn’t exploded, you should check out the false dilemma logical fallacy next!