TV Advertisement Evaluation

TV Advertisement Evaluation
The Brief :

     The brief for this was fairly simple, we had to choose an Unilever product and re-market it to a different audience so individually we all went on the Unilever website to choose one of their products and come up with an idea for an advert before being put into our groups. I choose to make an advert for Lynx but couldn't really think of how I could re-market it to a different audience as it already has been advertised to the correct audience and it just felt wrong advertising it to any other audience however once put into our groups we all shared our ideas and I thought mine was the weakest so we left mine behind and as a group choose to advertise Hellmann's mayonnaise as we thought we could get the best advert out of this, we could make good use any kind of subtle comedy if any and we also felt this had the best structure to it out of all the ideas pitched in the group. The target audience for Hellmann's Mayonnaise is families, we did want to keep this audience but we wanted to re-market the product itself. We wanted to advertise to families as it already was but originally it was advertised as more of a cooking sauce, we wanted to re-market it as a dipping sauce, something that you can have with any meal and are not so restricted as to what it can go on, most people would not dream of putting Mayonnaise on the burger or chips or anything like that and we plan to change that.

The Finished Product And Feedback :
        When we finished the product we then had to collect the feedback there were many ways of doing this, the first way we done it was by releasing online survey's using survey monkey and we got a fair few responses using this but trouble is we didn't attract our target audience using this, we mainly attracted young adults and mostly male ones so we failed to attract the family audience through survey monkey but we did hand out paper questionnaires to people after watching the ad, this was slightly better as we could control who did the questionnaire's and this attracted our target audience a little better and we got some more accurate results to use via this method, so it proved useful.

I feel that the advert was aimed correctly at our audience and was appropriate to the audience, I feel it sent a clear message to the target audience and would have an appropriate impact on them, I feel this as from our survey monkey questionnaire results although most of them were no our target audience a fair few people agreed it was clearly aimed for families, mainly parents as they would be the ones buying the product, so although our survey monkey results were unreliable as people did not take them seriously the ones that did take them seriously said it was clearly aimed at families and they also said they liked our advert, There was one result that said he found the voice acting boring, the advert didn't motivate him to buy the product and he thought the advert was average overall but this was one exception. I feel one thing that made the advert strong was the mise-en-scene it looked like a nice family home and kitchen and the music worked really well with this effect. It created a kind and laid back atmosphere for families and using mostly close up's creates a faced pace feeling advert that families will enjoy, most people who answered the questionnaire seriously said it was good for these reasons and it was brief but to the point making it clearly advertised for families.

    The music also helped create this feeling for it being targeted at families and this was the main sound used, although there was the voice over and there was one sound from the jar going on the table there wasn't much else. The reason behind it is that we wanted to keep the advert simple, yet effective. We decided that by doing this it wouldn't over complicate the advert with unneeded special effects and visual and it would keep the message clear which is what we wanted to do, have a clear message clearly targeted at families and from the serious answers in the survey monkey results I would say we achieved this. I feel that this was achieved because the content used in the advert was effective, as I said before simple yet effective and I feel this is what allowed it to succeed. It shows a clear message and serves it on a plate to the target audience. This shown wonderfully in a survey monkey response when they answer the question Does this advert to buy or try this product and why? with "I feel the advert is quite persuasive but not to the extent that it orders you to buy it, more so kindly asks.

 I feel this is because of the gentle music in the background and the general happy vibe of the advert" This is the exact type of answer I was hoping for, it displays exactly what we were trying to do, target families but not forcing them to buy it just letting them know that you can put mayonnaise on your meals rather than just ketchup and is more to the point of kindly asking and I feel that through kindly asking people to buy our product more people will be likely to as the marketing competition is a tough place a lot of adverts will just ask you or try to provide some information that will twist your arm into buying a product, where as if people see a nicer, kinder advert the would be more inclined to buy it as it's not forcing them to and people will appreciate this more than an advert that goes out of its way to make sue they buy the product.

I feel the advert is very persuasive but in a very subtle way, the advert immediately gets your attention with the voice over asking you questions, so it gets you thinking, almost straight after it gets your interest by telling you it has the answer to all these questions, it then proceeds to create desire by showing that mayonnaise can go on every meal and it makes you think I need something like that, something that I can put on every meal and it finally creates the action with the slogan "Bring Out The Best, Kick Out The Ketchup!" creating the action of throwing the ketchup out of the kitchen cupboard and off the kitchen table and bringing fourth the Mayonnaise. I feel that through the use of these persuasion techniques we achieved a clear clarity of communication in putting our message across we were trying to show and state that you can use mayonnaise with most meals and we clearly state this.

I think it is only really stated through the use of the voice over though especially with the line "A sauce that goes with every meal" this is the exact message we wanted to put across so the easiest way to do it was to put it in the voice over, so there was no real techniques used, we did want to advertise it to families and some young adults as well so the easiest way to do this was to have young actors using 2 males and a female one of the males being the alpha male of the household, wearing a suit shows he is the one that goes out to work and earns the money the female was meant to be the mother of the household but in my opinion she looks more like a young adult than the mother showing that maybe the alpha male is actually a single father which could reach a slightly larger audience, it's a possibility that it has done but if so it was done unintentionally. Overall I do feel that the advert is fit for it's purpose and it does look professional  however there is the BCAP code to consider.

 I do feel that we kept within the BCAP code but I do worry about the misleading advertisement  I say this due to the line that is "A sauce that can go on every meal" I fear that some people might actually take this literally so it could be considered misleading advertisement as someone might think it could literally go on anything like a bowl of cornflakes or something out of the ordinary such as that. When writing the voice over script I did consider this and thought about writing "A sauce that can go with almost every meal" instead of what was put in the advert but the problem is it doesn't sound as effective or as persuasive as it does before, although this is a small thing it is something to consider so I would probably makes sure I wasn't in jeopardy of breaking the BCAP code if I was to do it again.

Personal Reflection :
 

  Looking back at the original intentions for the advertisement by looking at the pre-production documents I feel that we stuck to them as much as we could have but due to unexpected things such as continuity errors some things had to be changed. But when I look at it now I think it might have been a good thing that it was changed, in the story boarding we could clearly see how the shots went and what we wanted them to be like and how the transitions should go but unfortunately things did not go to plan due to some continuity errors, these were only realized once we got the footage back to college and in order to fix them we had to cut the length of some shots and cut some shots complete resulting in huge gaps compared to the story board but I look at the final product and I think it looks better like this. If it had been kept to the original intentions the advert would have been much longer and would have had more shots just showing travel of characters and the jar of mayonnaise itself but with the final product the advert is much quicker, much more fast paced and gets straight to the point so I feel this is a good thing, although it did get to the point were the advert was too short I personally feel it's better to be as short as possible rather than dragging out he length of he advert, also to support this a lot of good comments from the survey monkey questionnaire was that it was short and to the point, not wasting the viewers time. So overall I am very please with the final product, I do feel it could have been made slightly longer through the use of 2 or 3 more shots just showing the family members and I do feel the voice over needs subtle adjustments, I feel it does sound rushed at times but this could just be due to the length of the advert but some of the lines could do with some subtle adjustments.


The whole group worked very hard with the development of this product and some did more so than others in certain areas and I am no exception to that, I feel for myself I did put more effort in the pre-production stage filling out the paper work than I did at any other point of the development of the project, at some points in the pre-production stage I may have took over and done too much not allowing the rest of the group to do much but then once filming began I tried to help behind the camera as much as possible but didn't help as much as I could have.

I feel that the point were I done the least amount of work was defiantly the editing stage, during this part I did often have a bad habit of not doing anything whilst someone else did the work. Only reason I did this was mainly due to the fact that I do have access to editing software at home and I do this at home as a sort of hobby so I wanted other people to have a go at editing but when working in a group project like this it is not acceptable for me to do that, especially when I have knowledge on editing and I didn't even offer my knowledge, this was without a doubt my weakest part in the production and I wish I had done more to help here rather than trying really hard at the start of the project and slacking at the end of it. But the whole group worked extremely hard on this project and I feel that the finished product was worth the time and effort put into it, it worked really well and although we did not ask much of our target audience on their views for the advert the people we did ask gave good feedback and even said it is clearly advertised at families so we managed to get our message across and clearly capture the target audience which was the brief originally so I feel the project went well but some things could be done to improve it however what we finished with was a good well presented advert that was clearly aimed at families and with that I am thrilled that the groups effort was rewarded in achieving this.