It’s official. The Patriots have won Super Bowl XLIX, and the marketing world is abuzz with discussions about this year’s Super Bowl’s commercials. Many of the ads were emotionally manipulative, with a focus on the strange and sadvertising. People of all ages, races, genders, and education level watch the Super Bowl, with a quarter of them watching the Super Bowl for the commercials alone, meaning that companies have to decide if they want to target specific customers.
But let’s focus on the emotionally manipulative part. How did these agencies know to how to be emotionally manipulative? That’s right, they profiled the people who watch the Super Bowl. Some agencies certainly missed the mark, and some ads like the Budweiser puppies are universally appealing, but ads like the Dove Men+Care: Real Strength were created based on data. Let’s take a look at how some of the ads profiled their potential customers.
Esurance: Sorta Your Mom and Walter White
Esurance even says who their target audience is within the ad. Their point is to be funny and appeal to all of the people that meet the same customer profile as those mentioned in the ad. For “Sorta Your Mom,” Lindsay Lohan says “Hey, I’m sorta your mom. We’re both 25-35, we’re both women on the go, and we’ve both clocked a lot of miles.” It doesn’t get clearer in profiling than that. Esurance figured out that some of their customers fit that profile, so they’re trying to pull in similar customers. The same goes for the “Sorta Greg” commercial, in which Walter White discusses being over 50, and other similar traits to “Greg.”
Dove, Nissan, And Toyota:
It’s no secret that more men than women watch the Super Bowl. Many of this year’s ads were aimed at these men, specifically fathers. It’s a pretty good bet…emotional ads are memorable, though many people said they were more excited to see humorous ads rather than sad ones.
Victoria’s Secret
A rather boring commercial compared to some of the other ones, but it’s a quick reminder to the men (probably 25-35) to buy a Valentine’s Day gift for their sweetheart.
GoDaddy
An extremely controversial ad this year was the GoDaddy puppy commercial, which was pulled before the Super Bowl. The commercial was supposed to be a spoof of Budweiser’s wildly successful puppy ads, but with a twist. The ad featured a puppy coming home, only to be sold online. It turns out a large percentage of GoDaddy’s target audience are women, which is why there was such an outrage at the concept of selling a puppy online. Nevertheless, GoDaddy is trying to target men and women 30+ who want to build their own website, usually to start their own business.
T-Mobile: Kim Kardashian
“Famous Person” and the Queen of Instagram, Kim Kardashian, teams up with T-Mobile for #KimsDataStash. She encourages users to stash their data with T-Mobile so that they can look at all of Kim’s selfies on Instagram. This ad is clearly targeted toward younger female users, since Instagram users are overwhelmingly female and 18-25.
All companies have to determine who their target audience is when creating an advertisement. They have to develop a buyer profile. Intelligent profiling can help with building that buyer profile, and finding people that are similar.
BY: Chase Kirkwood
