Sunday, March 26, 2006
Module 8: Advertising
Rationale for my parody of the MasterCard "priceless ads
We've all seen the ads for years. Three things with purchasing price and a voiceover by a man that says what the graphics say on the screen. The fourth thing is always a heart-tugging or humorous item that is "priceless". The ads conclude with the MasterCard slogan: "There are some things money can't buy; for everything else, there's MasterCard."
I find it ironic that a credit card company uses the word priceless. Priceless means it is so expensive that it no longer has a true cost http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/priceless. According to Fox News, 144 million Americans own a credit card of some sort (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,143037,00.html). Fox reports that in 2003 Americans with credit cards owed an average household amount of $7,520 to their credit card companies. The numbers are staggering: Americans owe about $1.5 trillion in credit card balances! Trillion with a T.
That's priceless to me.
OBJECTIVE
We've all seen the ad campaign copies everywhere: basketball fans holding up signs at the state tournaments (Tickets $15, Gas money $25, Hotel $125, Being at the State Basketball Tournament: priceless); internet parodies (Bottle of tequila $20, Tickets to Spring Break trip $700, Limbo party at bar: free, having your butt crack show on the internet forever: priceless); etc. I thought a more parody kind of an approach -- especially to credit card debt incurred in part by MasterCard itself -- would be interesting.
Here's the rest of my rationale for the ad:
TARGET AUDIENCE
The audience for my parody ad is the same as the original advertisements. These are people who are credit card owners and young folks who are going to be credit card owners. A lot of what I see in the priceless ad campaign is targeting 30-somethings. The sentimentality of the ads and the age of the kids featured (plus a lot of fathers and sons and fathers and daughters) also implies 30-somethings.
In addition, I believe the target audience has a handful of credit cards in their wallet. The idea is to make MasterCard (and not Visa nor American Express) money.
PERSUASIVE DEVICES
Certainly in the original ads there is a lot of bandwagoning and heartstrings used. The bandwagoning device is the peer pressure one: everyone's doing it, so if you want to be "in" you should also do the same. Heartstrings is an emotional attachment to the ad -- something sentimental or built on transfer of emotions to a product. In addition, there is transfer of the product. Transfer is a metaphorical/symbolic attachment placed on the items in the ad and the product/service. The transfer in the original ads appears to be happiness and priceless memories can be bought with a MasterCard.
In my ad, I used the device of parody humor. In true parody, there should be a message. My message wasn't so subliminal, however. I listed the reasons.
My kicker line was: having to pay off large credit card debt for years after the purchase: nearly priceless. I also included some card-stacking (persuasive device) statistics and facts garnered from a credit help company on the Internet.
CONCEPT/OTHER
I chose to pattern the entire ad after MasterCard as best I could. I watched versions of the ads on the internet and used the same font style, color and voice patters in my voiceover. I tried to match the editing style and the music levels. I felt the closest I could come to recreating a MasterCard ad, the more respect I'd have for how those were originally created and developed.
The concept of the MasterCard ads is phenomenal. The person who came up with this campaign had better be getting paid handsomely. It has what every advertiser wants: name recognition, word-of-mouth, simplicity, a good slogan, timing and consistency/repetition.
I hope I threw a correct ironic twist into this ad and helped get the message out that credit card debt is a massive problem in American society and there may be better ways to get out of the credit card debt cycle.
We've all seen the ads for years. Three things with purchasing price and a voiceover by a man that says what the graphics say on the screen. The fourth thing is always a heart-tugging or humorous item that is "priceless". The ads conclude with the MasterCard slogan: "There are some things money can't buy; for everything else, there's MasterCard."
I find it ironic that a credit card company uses the word priceless. Priceless means it is so expensive that it no longer has a true cost http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/priceless. According to Fox News, 144 million Americans own a credit card of some sort (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,143037,00.html). Fox reports that in 2003 Americans with credit cards owed an average household amount of $7,520 to their credit card companies. The numbers are staggering: Americans owe about $1.5 trillion in credit card balances! Trillion with a T.
That's priceless to me.
OBJECTIVE
We've all seen the ad campaign copies everywhere: basketball fans holding up signs at the state tournaments (Tickets $15, Gas money $25, Hotel $125, Being at the State Basketball Tournament: priceless); internet parodies (Bottle of tequila $20, Tickets to Spring Break trip $700, Limbo party at bar: free, having your butt crack show on the internet forever: priceless); etc. I thought a more parody kind of an approach -- especially to credit card debt incurred in part by MasterCard itself -- would be interesting.
Here's the rest of my rationale for the ad:
TARGET AUDIENCE
The audience for my parody ad is the same as the original advertisements. These are people who are credit card owners and young folks who are going to be credit card owners. A lot of what I see in the priceless ad campaign is targeting 30-somethings. The sentimentality of the ads and the age of the kids featured (plus a lot of fathers and sons and fathers and daughters) also implies 30-somethings.
In addition, I believe the target audience has a handful of credit cards in their wallet. The idea is to make MasterCard (and not Visa nor American Express) money.
PERSUASIVE DEVICES
Certainly in the original ads there is a lot of bandwagoning and heartstrings used. The bandwagoning device is the peer pressure one: everyone's doing it, so if you want to be "in" you should also do the same. Heartstrings is an emotional attachment to the ad -- something sentimental or built on transfer of emotions to a product. In addition, there is transfer of the product. Transfer is a metaphorical/symbolic attachment placed on the items in the ad and the product/service. The transfer in the original ads appears to be happiness and priceless memories can be bought with a MasterCard.
In my ad, I used the device of parody humor. In true parody, there should be a message. My message wasn't so subliminal, however. I listed the reasons.
My kicker line was: having to pay off large credit card debt for years after the purchase: nearly priceless. I also included some card-stacking (persuasive device) statistics and facts garnered from a credit help company on the Internet.
CONCEPT/OTHER
I chose to pattern the entire ad after MasterCard as best I could. I watched versions of the ads on the internet and used the same font style, color and voice patters in my voiceover. I tried to match the editing style and the music levels. I felt the closest I could come to recreating a MasterCard ad, the more respect I'd have for how those were originally created and developed.
The concept of the MasterCard ads is phenomenal. The person who came up with this campaign had better be getting paid handsomely. It has what every advertiser wants: name recognition, word-of-mouth, simplicity, a good slogan, timing and consistency/repetition.
I hope I threw a correct ironic twist into this ad and helped get the message out that credit card debt is a massive problem in American society and there may be better ways to get out of the credit card debt cycle.
# posted by Jim @ 9:59 PM 
