Audience appeals are a very important part of media, as identifying a target audience and knowing how to effectively engage them is vital to the success of your media products. The first advert i would like to look at to explore these appeals is the M&M’s advert from 2015 titled ‘eating in bed’.
In this advert, the audience is presented with a humorous situation. The husband opening the door and ‘catching’ the wife seemingly having an affair is initially both intriguing and shocking, and then the reveal of the red M&M is amusing and a clear subversion of expectations. The first major appeal of the advert is the recognisable characters of the M&Ms. These are characters who have been in pop culture for decades, and so many, many people and a wide variety of different groups of people will recognise the characters and associate them with the M&Ms brand instantly without the advertising needing to explicitly state what it’s promoting.
The target audience of this advert is not what you’d typically except from an advertisement for sweets. While many would expect children to be the target audience, this advert instead is more mature and suggestive, meaning it is intended for older audiences who would appreciate the humour being presented and consider purchasing the candy being advertised.
This advert also ties in to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This is a theory by Abram Maslow and it states that peoples’ needs are like a pyramid, and before a person can move up to the next stage the needs on their current level must be fulfilled. This was a psychological study and was not initially related to media, but it did influence the audience’s attitudes towards it and became integral to advertisers as they tried to understand how to fulfil their audiences needs. The M&M advert fulfils many of the lower tier needs, specifically on the very bottom of the pyramid, the obvious one being food; the M&Ms are characters but they represent real life food. Sex is also represented but in a subversive way, as the ad draws the viewer in with the expectation of something sexual unfolding, as ‘sex sells’ in the advertising industry, and then surprises them with the amusing reveal that the woman was actually just about to eat an M&M. A family dynamic is also represented in the advert, as it is made clear that the two human characters are in a relationship and they both look fairly typical, allowing the audience to see themselves and their lives reflected in the characters and their very normal setting.
Using Young and Rubican’s 4C’s Theory, we can identify the target audience as being mainstreamers. M&M’s are extremely popular products and the advert uses humour to engage the typical audience. The typical, average people represented in the advert are used deliberately to advertise to a typical, average audience member.
The second advert i would like to touch on is the Age Uk advert “Just Another Day”
This advert is an extreme departure from the previous one, as it as a charity advertisement about elderly people struggling with loneliness and has a much more somber tone.
The target audience of this advertisement is not the people being represented by the advert, but actually the opposite. The charity is hoping to engage younger people, specifically explorers. I think this as volunteering for a charity is a daunting task that not many even consider, and so this advert hopes to reach the very small amount of brave individuals who would do this important work.
The advert is shot in a very cinematic fashion, positioning the camera a decent distance away in many shots to really emphasise the loneliness that John is feeling. This is an attempt to engage the audience as it is visually interesting and then once they have their attention, allow them to absorb the message by making them feel sympathy for the character and his real life counterparts. The man, John, and the few settings he finds himself in are all quite plain looking again to allow the audience to feel like he could be anyone, perhaps almost guilting the average viewer into helping as one day it could be them.
Referring back to the hierarchy of needs, the idea of family is represented in an interesting way, as instead of showing us a family it shows us the lack of one and the effects of that on a person. John’s life is sad and the audience feels for him, and the adverts goal is for them to want to help people like him, and that is why they use these techniques.
Both of these adverts are very different in terms of genre and style, however are all media products are alike in the fact that they have a target audience in mind, and everything is designed to appeal to that group.
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