Our group was assigned the following challenge:
“Persuade retired senior citizens (aged 68-75) about guinea pigs”
As you may be able to guess, this was more than tricky. What do senior citizens care about guinea pigs? What do we convince them of? These questions were bouncing around all of our heads for the better part of the class period. An unnamed group-mate suggested that since a lot of seniors are homophobic, we should try to persuade them that if they give their grand-kids a guinea pig, they wouldn’t be gay. Needless to say, no one else agreed on this proposal. After more hemming and hawing, we decided to make an infomercial of sorts. We were going to write a short little speech convincing retired elderly grandparents to buy their grand-children a guinea pig for companionship. We thought this would be the most effective since elderly people are notorious for watching infomercials and believing most anything they say. However, when we got up to present our infomercial to the class, they disagreed. They dug for faults in our statements. 
They didn’t believe that our pitch was persuasive enough to actually convince anyone to buy a guinea pig. We thought that our infomercial would’ve had a similar persuasive air to this:
However, our audience disagreed and insinuated that our’s was more similar to the following ads:
Disrespectful, to say the least.
Danielle's English Blog 