Creative Media TV Ad Evaluation

BRUT advertisement evaluation

 Our brief for our current project was to make a 30 – 60 second advertisement of a product under the Unilever branch. We had to rebrand the product to suit a different demographic, and possibly psychographic, and research the methods other products have used in order to sell to our chosen group.

 The product we chose, as a group, was BRUT aftershave, which has been on the market since 1964, and was originally marketed as a gifted project, for middle to lower-higher class men, particularly fathers. We thought that BRUT would be the easiest product to rebrand as we could use students in the college and implement some young adult humour in order to drag in a younger age range and upper-lower – middle class demographic.

 We filmed over a period of three days around college, after thoroughly planning and getting the required paperwork to allow people to appear in the shots, and created a survey on surveymonkey.com to collect responses on how well the rebranding went, if people enjoyed the advert itself, and if they could identify the rebranded audience.

 In that survey, we included questions which identified the points in the advert people enjoyed most, with most concluding that the dialogue and sound worked best, whilst the logo was the down point of the advert; as well as discovering the channels they think it would appear on (Dave) and at which time (1pm-7pm), this identifying that our rebranding was successful in the sense that it was aimed towards younger boys, who would watch channels such as Dave, who would be flicking through channels after college – around 1 to 7pm.

 The theme of our advert was that wearing BRUT would make guys more attractive to women; make them seem classier, cooler and more approachable, shown through a change in music and the addition of the cinema-frames. This is shown in many adverts for hygiene products aimed at students, in which they achieve popularity or recognition from people they’ve been aspiring to either be or be with throughout the video.

 This is identifiable to young students, particularly those who fit the psychographic on the character shown on scene – a student with little self-confidence to talk to the girl he likes. The setting gives an obvious incline as to who we are rebranding the product towards, with the students starting out in a classroom doing some work on the computer.

 The comical aspect of the advert is the dialogue, paired with the slow motion and performance on screen to give the situation a light-hearted tone and further discourage BRUT’s serious, posh brand name.

 Due to how the advert turned out and the responses from the survey I think the advert would work well on television and draw in the correct demographic/psychographic successfully, with some extra editing and perhaps more time spent on the filming to ensure we got the correct shot-types.

 The dialogue was added unplanned, as we thought with a general description outlining BRUT as a product the advert was too serious and felt unfinished, but it ended up working well and we improvised some editing, such as the slow mo which works in coherence with some of the slowed down dialogue.

 We used direct mode of address, saying “You need BRUT!” to grab the viewers’ attention and draw them in, ensuring that the target audience is more involved with the advert and the product is attractive to them. Some of the language would have to be analysed against the BCAP code, though the intention is to show the advert later in the afternoon, around 4pm-8pm, when students are home from college and the amount of them watching television is supposed to be greater than at other points throughout the day. The language we used was colloquial to younger people, and therefore may come across as offensive or demeaning, particularly at the part where the word “bitch” is shortly cut off for comedic effect.

 The BCAP code states that offensive language cannot be used in advertisements directly aimed towards children – this includes phrases such as “Bloody hell” and lighter swears such as “Bitch.” Because our advertisement is aimed at young adults, does not finish the word and will be shown at a later time, it shouldn’t go against the BCAP code, though we could have made an alternate version which misses out the swear word to show before watershed.

 I believe that our advert works well in that it complies with the BCAP code and, proven by the feedback we got from the surveys, reaches our target audience very well. Although we edited the original idea majorly when it came to bringing the footage together, it works much better as a comical outlook on the product and more obviously tones down the more formal tone of the product, making it ideal for younger students.

 As a group we dealt out the editing process equally, with Adam moving most of the clips around and Poppy and I finding audio clips and giving feedback in order to make sure the advert worked well for all of us. In the planning I filled out a lot of the paperwork, Poppy did the storyboards and Adam and I worked together on the script. I think in ideal circumstances we would have gone through it again and ensured that every detail was filled out correctly, every recce and release form was signed and filled out and would have generally just checked over everything to ensure that the work was up to date, though I believe it was anyway.

 With the feedback, I would have liked to have gotten results from different age ranges of people rather than mainly people in the college class.

 The only things I would have done differently would have been to pay more attention to the task at hand; in the final cut have sped up some of the slow-mo so it people could hear it properly, and perhaps changed some of the lighting in the later clips to emphasise a change in tone and attitude towards the character.