Advertising agencies should cary out research into the campaigns that they are launching. This is to make sure that audiences read the advert in the desired way. The advert may be complex and have multiple readings and so a cross section of the audiences may need to be sampled.
Perhaps Don and Stan from mad men should have spent some more time on audience research before conducting this pitch for a dream Hawaiian holiday. As you watch try to think about what the advert says to you.
Here are some useful terms: Intended reading, preferred reading, denotation (what the image is) , connotation (what the image suggests).
You may also like to look at some of the acronyms here and here that advertises and marketing types use to group people together.
Part 1:
Fill in the grid for your case study advert.
Part 2:
Now analyse your the audeince and work out the demographic. Unit 1 LO2 requires you to 'understand the relationship between media products and their target audience', what this means in practice is that you can identify who the target market is for the product being advertised. You need to consider the following areas:
- Gender - is the product targeting a specific gender? How can you tell this?
- Age- is the product age specific e.g. a car?
- Lifestyle - what type of lifestyle will the consumer have? Is the good an everyday item or a luxury good? How will the item enhance the targets audiences lifestyle?
- Spending power - how much does the product cost? Who has spending power to buy the product?
You may want to consider the demographic groupings which are commonly used, these can be found here.
You should explain what aspects of the product in the advert would appeal to the target audience and what would influence the target audience to use the product. This may mean making links between other people who use the product and the target audience. It could be that the product being advertised is an aspirational product and that part of its appeal is that it is expensive. Equally the product may be more utilitarian and have a mass market appeal and the purpose of the advert is to remind people that it exists and to nudge them into buying it over other brands.