This week, my roommate was stumbling and happened to discover a very funny website which spotlights rhetorical billboards. One of my favorite pictures was of two billboards, which happened to be placed right next to each other on the side of a busy street. The billboard to the left is an advertisement from the car company Audi that reads, “Your Move, BMW.” The billboard to the right is a response from the car company BMW, which reads, “Checkmate.” Both of the car companies are trying to showcase their newest, coolest cars, and the companies are obviously rival luxury car producers. What appears to have happened is that Audi decided to take a shot at BMW with the billboard on the left, and BMW’s response to the advertisement was the billboard to the right, which probably went up quite soon after the Audi ad was put up. This ad does a few things for me rhetorically, with the placement of the ads, the simple words, and the simple make-up of the ads themselves.
The placement of the ads next to each other is very rhetorically genius idea by BMW. When the Audi ad went up, someone from BMW must have come up with the genius idea of turning Audi’s ad campaign into a positive for BMW. The phrase, “Checkmate,” is simple, but also is the perfect response to Audi’s challenging words. The response, which refers to the game of chess, is a response, which most people would be familiar with, and upon seeing it would get a chuckle out of the witty response of the BMW ad. The appearance of the ads is very rhetorical in themselves, because although there are pictures of each company’s featured cars on the billboards, the billboards draw the viewers’ eyes toward the words with their black backgrounds and white lettering which beg to be read. Aside from being pretty funny, this is a great example of rhetoric at it’s finest.
Author Unknown. cSlacker.com. 2011. 17, March 2011.
http://www.cslacker.com/images/file/mediums/billboard_wars.jpg
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