Deciding to watch the style channel, I knew that the commercials on this channel would be very distinctly geared toward the crowd that would watch the network. I knew that the commercials would be geared toward women, but what I didn't expect was the age group. I don't usually watch the style network, but I had always assumed it was something that more teenage girls would watch. On the contrary, the commercials are geared towards marraige-age woman. Several of which were for home improvement/ home-making products, such as disinfectant, or kitchen supplies.
One commercial in particular, which was for (if i remember correctly) a birth control pill, was obviously geared to women. However, the commercial had a physician reccomendation, in which an actual physician comes on the commercial to reccomend the pill, the commercial made a (i believe) conscious choice to make the phycisian a woman. Though a physician reccomendation is certainly a good thing to have in a commercial for a medical product, the fact that a female physician is helping to sell a birth control product gives it an even more powerful appeal to the audience because it establishes csoomething very obvious in common with the target audience- both women, and therefore both can speak the benefits of the product from actual experience as opposed to just medical knowlege.
1 comment:
Hey Tina, that's an interesting observation how they (probably) made a concious choice to make the physician a woman. While it is typical to see a predominantly female audience watching the Style channel, i think it's interesting why they chose this. I would be interested to see the reaction had they chosen a male physician instead (OK, i guess it would be somewhat awkward for a male doctor to be endorsing a birth control product (and just now I'm realizing... why?)). I would assume that it has something to do with the same way that other birth control pill commercials work, like the one for Yaz (which, if you haven't seen it, features a group of women who appear to be in their mid-twenties at a nightclub and one woman decides to tell all of her friends about it, including but not limited to the whole side-effect schpiel and how they should talk to their doctor if they have kidney or liver disease, etc. (what woman in their mid-twenties would go to a club with a speech like that in mind?)).
I'm going to go away now.
Thank you for your time.
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