OK, this isn’t a bad ad; it’s got the…wait, go back to the start for a second. Who on earth lets their kids bring a toad into the house to play around with? And why is the look on the boy’s face so creepy? That is bordering on frog molestation.
Asides from that, I’m sure the ad’s very appealing to the mothers that it’s targeting. It has most of the usual positive emotions that you’d want to see in a hand-wash ad (if you were a mother and you were worried about all that bacteria on little Timmy’s Lego): happy families; clean, white backgrounds, and, of course, pleasant scenes of hands being lathered in soap (which are probably performed by some top hand-models).
The music is pretty unremarkable though, and you’d want to be putting some memorable tunes on your ads to get as many memory cues linked to the ad as possible. If I could make the audience smell and taste my ads, I would. That sounded wrong.
The music is pretty unremarkable though, and you’d want to be putting some memorable tunes on your ads to get as many memory cues linked to the ad as possible. If I could make the audience smell and taste my ads, I would. That sounded wrong.
| Life isn't always easy for a hand-model |
If you remember watching the Old Spice ad, you might remember reading about low ‘involvement’ – when an audience doesn’t rate a certain purchase as a big priority, and is persuaded by positive emotional stimulation and humour rather than by argument. We’ve got a low involved audience here again, since hand-wash isn’t a big deal (unless you have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). Although this works for the ad, it made me think about the product itself…it’s revolutionary! It’s amazing! You avoid all those germs because you don’t have to touch the soap pump! Wait a minute…when the fuck was the last time I touched the soap pump after I washed my hands? That’s right, never, since that begins before the hand-washing stage. Still, it does looks pretty cool. I want one.
