How do advertisements appeal to a target audience?

ENGLISH MEDIA COURSEWORK

What is advertising?

Advertising is a way to send out its product to the public and while sending out the product, they aim to inform and persuade the public to buy the product. But that’s not all about advertising. Roger Thomas wrote the book ‘advertising’ and he describes advertising as ‘any form of public announcement that is designed to promote that sale of a particular goods or services, or to persuade a group of people to carry out a particular course of action’. But, Roger Thomas goes on to say that, that definition is one of many others, which means advertising is not the only way to ‘persuade persuade to want things, or to agree with your viewpoint’. So, what are the other things that make up advertising? Maybe having a target audience?

What is a target audience? A target audience are the people that the advertising company are targeting to buy a product. Without the target audience there would no one buying the product, so the advertising employee’s would be out of a job. So, the target audience are what the advertising companies consider as their top priority and main concern for the product, and whatever the people want, then that’s what they are going to get. (Or at least what they know will make them money is what they will market to the people).

You have to consider these things before picking your certain audience:

Age, Sex, Race, How big their family is, How much they are earning, How far they have got in their education, How old they are.

You also have to consider what kind of environment you are going to target your product to be sold in. whether it’s going to be

In the United Kingdom or any other part of the world (e.g. America, Japan)
Urban or rural environments
Inner city or suburban

When you publicise something, you communalise it to the public. When communicating your promotional product to the public, you need to keep to things in perspective. These are informing and persuading. Advertising can often be set in these two groups, and it’s hard to promote your product unless you have taken it through these two points.

When your selling you product you have to inform the people your selling it to, so they know what they are buying. It’s vital that they know the basic points like:

What the product looks like
The product availability
The price
The after-sales services
The quality
The style
The taste (but not in all cases)

It’s not only the customers that need to be informed about the product, many other companies need to be like:

Public relations
Direct mail
Employees
Shareholders
Local communities and
Government departments like to be part of the product.

Telling people about the product is easier than trying to change their minds to buy the product. In other words ‘persuading is harder than informing’. When persuading you have to change what a person thinks about that creation, and convince them that they would be better off buying for their own benefit. The point of persuading is to make people change their minds, buy the new product, buy the old product, or continue buying the old product, and to tell a friend about the product so that the news spreads.

There are so many different ways products can be advertised to the public

Television commercials, Radio, Billboard advertisements, Internet, on the bus, Posters, Telling friends (word of mouth), Telephone, Newspaper articles, Letters.

One of the biggest ways of advertising these days is by the Internet. This is simply because wherever you are, and whoever you are, you can access the Internet, and you can send messages to all over the world. This makes it easier for the rest of the world to know about your new products.

I have chosen an advert called ‘World Vision’, which is similar to an Oxfam advert. The advert is campaigning for help, for the children.

The age of these children would be approximately between the ages 3 to 9 years old. They are innocent little children who can’t fend for themselves. Their facial expressions portray the torment and struggle they have had to endure, and are still enduring. Their faces and surroundings also show their poverty. Some of the children are crying. They were born into poverty, and are still living in poverty. Some of the children are facing the camera directly and giving us a solemn message saying ‘I need your help’, and ‘please help me’. No words are even needed, you can see through their eyes that they are tired, and sick of living the way they do. They are sick of their family getting sick and passing away because of the diseases, and lack of food and water.

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Many of the children cant even face the camera. This shows us the pain that they are feeling. They can’t face the world. The pain and the world are overtaking the little strength they have left to cry out.

The children in the advert are sitting directly in font of the camera, and I can tell they have been told to do this, as this is what would appeal to the viewers.

The advertisements only briefly spoke upon one girl called ‘Adelia’. They said and wrote that she was ‘seven years of age, an orphan living by ...

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The children in the advert are sitting directly in font of the camera, and I can tell they have been told to do this, as this is what would appeal to the viewers.

The advertisements only briefly spoke upon one girl called ‘Adelia’. They said and wrote that she was ‘seven years of age, an orphan living by herself, and just to get food she would carry her weight in water 3 times a day for two miles’. What does this tell us about the girl? It tells us that she has no help, no family, and has been forced to forsake her childhood, and become mature so that she can take care of and feed herself. The relationship all of them have is that they all live in a poverty stricken country and live that lifestyle. Some have been abandoned, and they are hungry, some are sick, and are alone in the world. That’s why they are appealing to us to rescue them from poverty.

The ad is set in a 3rd world country such as India, or Asia. The reason for this is so the viewers can have an image of the surrounding they have to live in, where they have to travel through bare land to afar just to pull water out of a well, or from the river.

The emphasise of the green environment was to show the lack of technology, and everything was still the same, and nothing had moved on.

The visual techniques are moving are moving and sometimes still. They have done it in this way so that to the public it would seem real, and so the words would jump up out at them and so would the whole issue. The aim is to draw people towards the suffering of the people in the 3rd world countries and urge them to take immediate action. They’ve used colour in this again to show the naturalness and poverty of these countries, and the realistic features in the add, such as the emotions on their faces.

The ad hasn’t been lit in any particular way, but when I was watching the advert the only thing I saw the children. After seeing the children, I then saw the environment. But I had been drawn to just the children when I first look at the advert, I could feel as there was a fluorescent light around them although not physically. The fluorescent light was to highlight their presence, and draw other peoples eyes to them sitting there.

The camera was placed right in front of the children, except for Adelia because the advertisers wanted to emphasize the environment as well as her. The other children aren’t moving more than their heads, this is probably because if they di the viewers wouldn’t be able to see their emotions on their faces.

A wise trendsetter once said ‘looks are everything’ (I think it was Cher). How they portray Adelia, and how she moves says a lot about everything. The way she is moving gives us a clue about her unhappiness, and her loneliness. The way she is walking, and taking one pace at a time carrying her basket of water shows us that whenever she does, she does to survive. Then when she gets the water and starts slowly pacing away from the area, I can sense that she feels that she believes that one day is coming when this poverty shall end, and that she will have a family, shelter, and be loved.

They use a lot of children faces because they know that children are innocent, and haven’t got the means of money to take care of themselves. They also show them for a period of around 5 - 6 seconds, and then they change it to the next picture. Each time they change to the next picture, the page slowly closes, and then opens again to another child’s misery. If you don’t pay attention to the advert then you wont see that. The pace of change is very steady, and slow, so that you can see the expressions, and emotions on their little faces. One boy has tears running down his face, and he is saying, “Is this all there is?” and another little boy says, “ Does anyone care?” They ask rhetorical questions to make us the viewer think, hang on we should stop caring about ourselves and being selfish, and we should learn to care about others. Both of the boys think that no one cares, and they are right, not a lot of us care today.

Enlarging the picture is a good way to show the feelings of some of the children. Air brushing bits is sometimes a good way because it shows only the important sections of the image. The images take up quite a lot of space especially in the beginning, because the pictures were close shot. I think the images fit in well with the overall design of the ad, because when I think of the people in poverty, I think of the shabby poor areas, and that’s what they have been able to portray.

There is no brand name, because there is no actual product, but the name of the company is World Vision. The slogan that I heard them say at the end was ‘Choose to change a child’s life’ which I think relates to the image because the children’s lives don’t mean anything to them. They have no chance to experience love, so we could change that. The words ‘Choose’ in the slogan patronizes us saying that we can either be selfish or caring. And that all the child’s solutions lie in our hands, and out of our pockets.

In the background of the advert, there was backing music. The music was slow and swift. It was the kind of music that makes you think, if you had to be silent for Remembrance Day. There was also a person speaking over the swift music, and there was text on the page in which was disappearing whilst one was appearing. The music would not appeal to the younger generation because it’s not very beaty, or lively, so they would probably overlook the adverts. There’s a female voice over the top, a I think it’s good that they used her voice because it matched the kind of music they played, and the pace she spoke at matched the pace of the music. Being female also shows vulnerability.

She spoke in formal language, mainly because they are targeting an older target audience, and not a younger one because they’re not likely to spend the little pocket money on something that doesn’t affect them directly.

On the children’s faces, you could see that they’ve all been through similar experiences, and that is why they used those children in the adverts. The advert does have a story, but it hasn’t come to ending part yet it seems. I think in the end though they will find happiness, and someone out there will open their purse or wallet, and bring out a fat cheque, that’s able to help many people.

Because this ad is aimed at the older target audience, then if it were to be advertised in a magazine it wouldn’t be Mizz or J17, it would be more of Readers Digest, or magazines for adults. You would probably see the advert in a tube station underground on a poster. If this ad is published in a magazine it would be somewhere in the middle pages because now-a-days people consider other things more important, and they try and squeeze the other things in if they can.

On television, they usually do this advert around the morning and the afternoons and then the evenings. I only see this advert after the news has been told, which gives you another hint to who it’s aimed at, which is adults. I’m not sure where else they broadcast this advert but I would suppose that it would be broadcasted in the rich MEDC areas of the world like London, America, Japan, and other parts.

The overall message that the ad gives is

‘Choose to change a child’s life’

Creating my own Advertisement

When we were constructing our own advertisement that meant that we were doing a lot of thinking as if we were the advertising employees. We had to consider our target audience first, so that we would make our product around the people who would buy it. We had to select a social class, the age of people we wanted to aim it to, and whether the product would be useful to both sexes. After thinking about the target audience for a while, we came up with the age group we wanted to use. We agreed that the age group would be between 15 – 25, and it would be working class people. The reason for this is because we wanted to pull teenagers and early adults to buy our product. We thought that teenagers played a big part, because, once they saw the product, if it was good then they would go and buy it, or make their parents buy it for them. So, when they have it on and friends happen to notice it, they would want to purchase it too. We thought that whatever was in fashion is what the majority would follow.

Earlier before we started thinking about the jeans itself, we still needed to discuss if we were going to make jeans tat would be of use to both sexes, or just for one. To be honest, at first, I didn’t have a clue about what it would be called, the colour code, or anything, but after discussing various options with my group, we were able to come up with a name.

The name is the most important point (besides the product and the people buying it), because it says a lot about the product. We people were to hear the name or come across it; they would expect it to match the product. We had series of different options for out brand name. Out main three were ‘Enflame’, ‘Flammable’, and ‘Flammable Jeans’.

We chose the name Flammable after we sent a survey around the class, and they chose Flammable as their best brand name for our product. Now knowing our brand name, we had to start drawing out what flammable would look like on out final poster (Billboard). When I was developing to get my final design, I had to experiment with different colours, and different types of font. Without doing that, you would be wasting time and wasting paper. As you can gather from all of my rough sketches, out of all the colours I experimented with, I chose Red, Orange, Yellow, and Black to colour in my Flammable design. All four of us in our group had to do the same thing so that when we put our designs together; we would pick the best one.

Brainstorming to find a slogan was a lot easier than making up a slogan because we had a lead to go on. We thought of slogans like

U play wid fire, U get burnt
Its Hot, it’s Dangerous, it’s FLAMMABLE
Feel the heat
Heat up your life
Light up your sense
Light up your life

A slogan is a catchy phrase like ‘just do it’ for the band name ‘Nike’. After taking my different slogans round the class (my public), we were left with two slogans, which were: ‘U play wid fire, U get burnt’, and ‘it’s Hot, it’s Dangerous, it’s FLAMMABLE’.

The majorities vote was option number two, which I thought was good but I preferred the other one better. Our last bit was creating a logo, and that was simple because we had our slogan, and our brand name so all we needed to do was to combine then together to make a logo. Because we were around the idea of fire, I drew a flame that had an F in the middle of the flame.

After all that was completed, we had to put all our information, and product onto a poster billboard (the final piece). After a lot of discussion, we concluded that we needed a final piece in which all our information was surrounded by. Our final piece was a woman wearing the jeans we had created, and a top that had our logo on it. The woman was in the middle of the page with the flames surrounding her, and around the flames was the slogan. There were people in the background staring at her. I was given the role of adding the entire colour to the poster. The poster turned out to be brilliant in the end.

The main element of the slogan, and jeans were fire. We chose to base it around fire because fire is a dangerous element, and so we wanted to bring that danger element image into the jeans. So our jeans could jump out, and give the image that whoever is wearing the jeans is looking Hot!

The reason why it was attractive was because there was a woman in these jeans, and as far as the advert goes it was showing the danger of both the woman and the jeans, and how the jeans were fitted for the woman.

It was successful because our group was able to work together, and share and agree over ideas.

Analysis of finished advertisement

I do think my advert was very successful because I put a lot of effort into trying to please the target audience as well as myself. I think the advert itself has a lot of potential as well as the people who made it. One thing that’s really good about our ad is that it has an outburst of colour. This is good because it means it would be eye-catching, and easy to spot. Also, when I look at it, it gives me a radiant sense of heat, because of all the fiery colours.

It would appeal to my target audience because now jeans are in, so people would go for jeans. But even if jeans weren’t in, I know that my target audience would like it because they like the kind of jeans we have made, so that’s why we made it in the first place. The whole point of doing the research is to find out what people like, and what they would generally go for. The link between teenagers and jeans today is that, all kids follow the fashion, and what makes them look good and heads turn. They like to wear things that are attractive, and show of their figure, and make themselves feel good.

My advert, and they World Vision advert are kind of similar in very strange ways. The way I described the children being the centre piece, with the invisible fluorescent light glowing around them which draws you to look at them, is similar to the lady in my poster as the centre piece with the fire surrounding her, that id making her stand our amongst the people who are staring at her.

Another similarity is that both the children in the World Vision ad, and my Flammable jeans, want to be seen. The children want people to see them so they can rescue them from the life they are living now. Whereas, the woman wants to be seen because she looks good in the clothes that she is wearing.

I say that it’s very strange to have similarities because the ads are so different. One ad is about showing off a product of clothing with bright, bold, fiery colours, and the girl looking great and smiling saying ‘life is good when you’re wearing the right clothes’. But the other one is about the suffering of the children in 3rd world countries with no food, especially no clothes to wear, and no proper shelter.

Conclusion

I enjoyed making the advert, but you have to understand how much work goes into it. If I hadn’t done the work in the beginning, I wouldn’t have come up with something as good as I have here.

What I did I guess was a mini version of what the real advertising employees do, but even so, I thought doing the project was a great way, and introduction on the background that people are paid to do, and what come up on our televisions.

The bit I found the hardest was coming up with a brand name because that was the start to drawing my advert besides the target audience, social class, and sex.

Our found out that making a product for men was a lot harder than making a product for women. We chose to work with women was a lot harder to work with. Also we had more experience in what women look for in clothes seeing as though we were females ourselves.

It was an experience working with different people in a group, and because we were able to get along, we had no problems communicating.

My favourite part out of the whole project was to make the advert, and me having the role of colouring the whole thing in. our group had no problem with the advert, because we knew what we were doing and how we were going to go about doing it.

The bit I didn’t like after the whole thing was having to write up everything we did afterwards. This slowed down my creative spirit.

In conclusion, the majority of the time I spent on this project was well spent, and well enjoyed.