I know you’ve seen the commercials for home products, or personal enhancement products which flood the airwaves. I assume the advertisements are placed after careful consideration of the target audience of the program itself, but sometimes I wonder. These ads feature satisfied users, yelling at the top of their lungs about the advantages and must have features of the item being advertised. We often wonder if they know how loud they are yelling.
For years, most of the ads targeted housewives with products and gadgets which would make everything go better. The house clean, the windows sparkling, little or no effort required, and a smiling homemaker dressed in church or evening out style. Folks, no one vacuums in high heels, or cleans house in a dress.
I almost got the feeling of being deprived, here in the suburbs without all that amazing stuff. I got a good cure the first time I entered an “As Seen On TV” store. There were rows and rows of amazing products, piled from floor to ceiling, accompanied by small televisions, running the ad appropriate to the product. I could have taken hope any or all, assuming I had a large enough sack of money, and a large enough truck. That’s when I noticed that most of the items were pretty chintzy, cheap looking. One might wonder if they could even address their stated purpose without falling apart. I think we bought some micro fiber dust cloths, and I even found those thin and small compared to some I had purchased somewhere else.
I find most of today’s super direct commercial messages for feminine, incontinence or other personal products offensive, and I don’t even know why. I guess it is that I was taught from a young age that certain subjects were private, we don’t talk about them. You would think after watching a few of these commercials that we were all in pretty bad shape, with performance problems, incontinence, heartburn, diarrhea, constipation, low calcium, aches and pains, and so on. It the commercials are reflective of the general population, I wonder how anyone gets the lights on at the offices and factories in this country. It would appear that everyone should be, or is, rubbing something on, taking something, or talking to their doctor about some remedy they need NOW.
The ad that’s bothering me right now is running on Versus during hockey, and most any other evening sporting event. For a long time the face of the commercials was a strange guy with a big fake smile. His wife also sported a huge fake smile, and everything is great at their home due to the effects of this OTC medication which solved all their problems. If things are as great as they purported them to be, there should be a hockey team of little smiling faces somewhere around there, but I didn’t see even one.
Recently, some of the advertisements have things switched things around a little. A serious woman in more professional clothing now extols the virtues of the product. She seem seriously happy, the product just gave her a little more, “to see,” … I guess I don’t want to type out the commercial, I have enough spam to delete now, and I know the wording would attract even more.
THERE’S MORE!
This would all be pretty funny, except for something I heard from D1. One of D1’s old friends is a pharmacist. Apparently, people come into pharmacy every day, asking about some product they heard about on the TV. Most of the people don’t have any idea what the remedy is supposed to cure, never mind who the target audience for it is.
I suppose there have been plenty of surveys, studies, and analysis concerning the effectiveness of the commercials. I guess, as a group, we’re buying. If we weren’t, the advertisements would vanish. I’m not buying — most of the time the postage and handling seems to be pretty high in comparison with the size and weight of the product. It must cost a bunch to make those commercials.
