McCain’s ‘We Are Family’ advert, which was created by Adam&EveDDB, looks to celebrate “modern day families” at meal time. The ad shows a host of real families, from single parents and LGBT+ families to “grandparents who act as parents”, proving that everyone still unites over meal times together. The £6m activation was formed in response to brand research, which found half of Brits don’t think popular culture reflects the reality of modern families and 84% of consumers were unable to recall seeing anything in popular culture that featured a family like their own in the last six months.
Using this information, McCain’s cleverly designed an advert that targets a huge audience, warming the hearts of different types of families all over the UK which will get them a lot more buyers. As it is not done very often in media, especially in advertising, including an LGBT+ family in their advert will definitely get the attention from these types of families and LGBT+ supporters. Overall for audience appeals, they have done a very good job at targeting a wide audience as families that are not seen as the ‘norm’ aren’t used to fitting in and feeling a part of a community however this advert unites everyone together while also subtly getting across the message that their brand of chips is best to buy for a nice family meal time.
Dollhouse is the debut single by American recording artist Melanie Martinez. The song was featured on Martinez's debut EP Dollhouse, where it was released as the EP's lead single in 2014. Dollhouse was later featured on Martinez's debut studio album, Cry Baby.
Lyrically, "Dollhouse" is about a dysfunctional family, who, according to Martinez, is "hiding being a perfect plastic facade". Martinez has also stated that "Dollhouse" is a metaphor for how people view celebrities and their seemingly perfect public lives. This story line is also shown in the music video for it – The family is visualized as the dolls living inside of a playhouse that belongs to a little girl. Since the daughter knows the truth about her dysfunctional family, she narrates the song in an attempt to get the girl to understand her reality.
The music video for the song was directed by Nathan Scialom & Tom McNamara and uploaded on Martinez's YouTube channel in 2014. The video starts with a young girl playing with her dolls in a dollhouse. The doll she is playing with is one that has makeup that is made to look like Martinez, who is playing the character ‘Cry Baby’ (a character that features throughout all Melanie’s songs on her Cry Baby Album) in the video. The girl leaves the dollhouse, and the camera gives a close up as the song starts. It then zooms in on Cry Baby, who is inside of the dollhouse. She sheds the light on her dysfunctional family, explaining that her father is out cheating on her mother, while her brother is smoking marijuana, as the camera pans over her mother who is passed out on the couch holding a wine bottle.
Similarly, to the McCain’s advert, this music video also highlights how ‘family’ is something different to everyone, no two being the same, yet in a very different and dark way. McCain’s used the idea of diversity and uniqueness in families to bring the nation together as a whole whereas Melanie talks about avoided and dark topic such as adultery, drug addiction and toxicity in families to make people realize everyone is going through their own problems and everything isn’t always as it seems. What she said in an interview supports this: “it’s about how everyone has their problem and you’re never going to truly see them. There’s always going to be a front to everything. You think that things are perfect, but everyone has shit that they go through.”
Melanie’s fan base mainly consists of teenage girls. Most of her lyrics deal with the struggles of growing up female, with an unusually little evocation of the “getting-and-keeping-a-guy” fixation that much of pop culture try desperately to convince young women should be their key concern. The songs that are primarily about romantic relationships — ‘Play Date’ and ‘Carousel,’ for instance — are not sugar-coated. Instead, they capture the complex and often excruciating nuances of sexual coming-of-age. It’s hard to pin point the specific target audience Melanie may have been going with her song dollhouse due to its dark features and unusual topic. However personally I believe her aim was to target people who are more open minded and can maybe relate to some of the things she talks about, as well as of course raise awareness of the subject.
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