One Half Minute with Your Target Audience

I had originally intended on starting up "One Half Minute" as a regular column and I've discovered through tracking my page hits that it's the most popular of everything I've posted here. So, I'm going to continue the idea as I had it a few years ago and delight you all with another edition of... da da da daaaa... ONE HALF MINUTE!!!

Today we're going to talk about target audiences. Here's Wikipedia's definition:

A target audience is the primary group of people that something, usually an advertising campaign, is aimed at appealing to. A target audience can be people of a certain age group, gender, marital status, etc. (ex: teenagers, females, single people, etc.) A certain combination, like men from twenty to thirty is often a target audience. Other groups, although not the main focus, may also be interested. One of the most important stages involved with market research. Without knowing your target audience advertising and the selling of a particular product can become difficult and very expensive.

I feel especially proud that my demographic got its own shout out in this definition, because I've often felt that a lot of advertising is at me. Now I know that that's not part of my paranoia; Wikipedia has supported it.

The day I saw the auto insurance commercial (I'm almost positive it was State Farm or Progressive, but it could have also been Geico. Google is failing me right now) with the musician who backs into a poll I remember saying out loud, "Wow, I feel really marketed to right now."

In this particular ad, A hip-looking twenty-something guy says, "It's good to know [whichever company]'s there in case my van gets pummeled by adoring fans... or I accidentally back into a poll. Seriously, it came out of nowhere."

Auto commercials are a great place to look to when dividing up what the industry calls "market segments." Let's go again to Wikipedia: "A Market segment is a subgroup of people or organizations sharing one or more characteristics that cause them to have similar product needs."

If you'll notice, in general companies tend to stick to one or two particular segments. For example, State Farm frequently shows older people, although has more recently started to branch out to the younger crowd. Their commercials are usually well done and safe, in the sense that they don't rely on humor or any sort of edginess.

Safe Auto is, as far as I can think, the company with the lowest production value, and usually seems to target lower income people. Their commercials all center around the ethos, "It's illegal to drive without insurance, so you might as well get it cheap from us." Their annoyingly catchy song has been pointed out as such in their own commercial, yet they insist on playing it over and over and not changing it.

Geico totally targets my age group and the college-aged, using absurd humor such as the cavemen, the witty gecko with the British accent and (in an old commercial (again, almost positive it's Geico, but it could be something else)) the dog who drives his owner into a pond. This is a good place to segue into the use of non sequitur humor in fast food commercials, too.

Fast food advertising is targeted primarily at males in their late teens and early twenties, and to do that agencies use nonsensical and juvenile humor. Taco Bell is a good example of this. One of the commercials that comes to mind is the one for the Gordita Crunch in which the coworkers (two male, one female) are trying to mix three adjectives together into one word. I know that "cheesy" and "crunchy" were two of them. The third may have been "chewy," but I'm not sure. Anyway, the two guys are going back and forth, and then the woman chimes in. The guy next to her immediately blurts out, "I love you."

The champion of this form of advertising, though, is by far Burger King. I've been paying close attention to Burger King's advertising for years now, and have been telling anyone who would listen that I thought they were really good commercials, but I wasn't sure exactly why. They're absurd, but at the same time there's something I find that's really well-done about them. I eat Burger King maybe once a year, and only by circumstance, but I find the advertising appealing.

I was validated in my opinion this past February when USA Today wrote an entire article ("Burger King of Cool?" 2/7/2007) about their ad campaign and the introduction of The King, who is, according to a source in the article, "in-your-face cool. But he's also very, very, very disturbing." I can still remember the first commercial with him. A guy wakes up with The King in his bed staring at him and offering him a breakfast sandwich.

The article details their quest to become hipper through the use of their creepy mascot and changing the names of food items, such as calling double cheeseburgers "Stackers," and wraps become "Hold'ems," served in holsters.

Some of my personal favorites in the Burger King advertising are the big clucking and hucking chicken, i.e. a guy in a big chicken suit. I can't remember what he was doing in the first one, I want to say he was riding a bull, but in the second one he was BMX biking. And also the chicken that wants to be a French fry ("Hey, chicken! What are you doin' hangin' out with those French fries? Maybe you wanna be a French fry!" "Yeah, maybe I do wanna be a French fry.").

There was one that was only played a couple times that I really enjoyed. It was in the Chicken Fry series and focused on race car drivers. The pit stop workers' attempts to feed the drivers chicken on their way out of the pit via a chicken speared on the end of a long pole weren't working out, and they found the solution with the chicken fries.

To emphasize the focus on males aged 18-35, there was the commercial where a mob of males (probably all between the ages of 18 and 35) sing while marching down the street ("I am man, hear me roar" or something like that) and throw a minivan off of a bridge.

I feel that the main thing setting Burger King's ads apart from other companies is the stark and dramatic quality in the production, which makes the nonsensical humor that much more absurd.

I'm starting to go on a little too long, so I'm going to wrap this baby up.

The main thing that we need to keep in mind with all this is that we're essentially talking about people convincing you to buy one product or service over another, even when they're all basically the same. A Hold'em may come in a holster, but it's still just a wrap. Stacker's still just a slick name for a double cheeseburger.

Insurance, which in my opinion is one of the biggest legal scams running right now, costs just as much whether you get it from Safe Auto or All State. The only car insurance that actually does have significantly lower prices, at least according to most of the people I've talked to, is Geico. Who's service is better, I can't really say; I wouldn't be able to afford it anyway.

And the companies that are hired to make these products appealing to their target audiences, such as myself, are paid a lot of money to be good at it, I'm sure. Obviously I'm not involved personally in this industry, so I can't throw around actual amounts of money. But no doubt Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the agency that handles Burger King, truth, Slim Jim, Miller Lite and Volkswagen, therefore introducing us to Nate Torrence, are compensated handsomely and also spend liberally for placement during prime time and sports.

It's gotten to the point where there's so much effort invested in making commercials catchy or entertaining that people often forget which company or what product was being advertised. Beer ads are mostly interchangeable, as are a lot of other commercials. Sometimes there's hardly even a mention of what it is that's being advertised.

Since television and prints ads are starting to have less and less effect on our culture, agencies are figuring out ways around that, sometimes even trying to hit you when you don't know that you're being marketed to. We'll talk more about that next time on... ONE HALF MINUTE!!!