- Fear of failure
- Fear of social exclusion
- Fear of rejection
- Fear of incompetence
- Fear of loneliness
In more recent times there have been a large amount of adverts aiming at young adult target audiences, with adverts containing lively or humorous events. Recently the theme has been that of dancing. Whether advertising anything from cars to yoghurt, dancing, when done well, can make a product very appealing suggesting that the product contains/will give you a great deal of energy and skill. In a recent car advert for the Citroen C4, a car that is quite bulky and not necessarily what a young person would be looking for, the car suddenly turns into a robot (in the style of ‘transformers’) and dances really stylishly to music, then suddenly jumps and is the car again. The tagline is “alive with technology”. It is difficult to read into this advert: it may be that the dancing car simply attracts the audience’s attention, or it may be that our fascination with technology and ignorance of how it work is being played on by showing us an amazing piece of technology that is apparently easy to understand. Advertisers are finding it more and more difficult to appeal to anyone ,let alone their target audiences and therefore an advert like this one, that the audience enjoys watching will be very successful. The audience remember the brand (and hopefully the car.)
Another recent advert featuring dancing is for the entire range of Müller products. It features assorted people doing very difficult dances to the sound of a song stating ‘I love life’ and then show at the end of the advert all the people who were dancing eating one of the assorted Müller products. The tag line is ’lead a Müller life’ which is a play on words on lead ‘a fuller life.’ Again this ‘ad’ catches the audience’s attention. This commercial doesn’t have an obvious target audience as such, but instead, by showing an assortment of people dancing, it attempts to appeal to as many people as possible.
In 1997 an advert for Nike entitled ‘Parklife’, directed by Jonathan Glazer, a very talented young director who has directed many adverts, contained major football stars of the time, playing with people of the Sunday league as if they were in it.
This appealed to the average football enthusiast as it showed that it was Nike that made them good whatever league they were in which was the tagline as well. This advert was filmed in a stylish way with ‘lad’s’ music and was meant to appeal to working class young men. Lots of close ups and stills make the identity of each various superstar playing in each game clear; it also features a lot of footage of normal people. This encourages the target audience to have a sense of pride for what their being shown. Often this target audience would also be very patriotic so making the advert very English with an English band, blur, playing their song; ‘Parklife’ and English location and stars worked to the advertisers advantage as Nike is an American company and therefore there would be some bad feeling felt towards them by this highly patriotic section of society.
And thus this advert was and still is a success from Nike’s point of view. And it is a good example of how a company will target their audience. The tagline ‘whatever league you’re in’ reveals the real theme of this advert, that of equality. The whole point that is trying to be conveyed to the audience is that these stars playing football in a Sunday league are equal to them in their status and yet they still play like they do because of the sports equipment they wear. This is implied by the sudden zooms and stills of the boots these players are wearing.
In conclusion it is quite easy to see that for an advert to be successful a target audience must be found and appealed to. This target audience depends on the product. An advertiser must have this target audience in mind when they film their advert and must be sure to include the aspects and techniques of advertising that appeal most to their target audience ; for example, humour. In essence all of us are a target audience for some product and it is just a matter of time before we fall prey to new clever advertising techniques and shiny new technology.
