Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of Americans....

Unfortunately this is the slogan that would best define my advertising campaign, if i had one. Its just so true. Here is a good example of how we can be confused by statistics in adds and duped into buying a product that will make our lives "more safe".

This is a Sylvania Silverstar Ultra Headlight commercial. The add is a TV commercial with a run time of about 30 seconds, and its pure class. The background music starts out as crowd noise, to get you in that rowdy "red blooded all American" mood, and then fades into a nice country song to set the caring tone for the rest of the ad. Like I said its pure class, here this is what I'm talking about.



The ad starts out with the "plain-folk" approach, perhaps lulling you into a false sense of security. Then it rattles off some stats about how their head lights are like "50% brighter" and "40% farther" which is good, cause you know you want your head lights to light up stuff. Then it drops the bomb. It prefaces the big bang with this cozy statement, "Why would any fun loving, red blooded, all American male give up watching football to upgrade his head lights?" Then some stats, never mind that they don't bother to mention what they are comparing them to, maybe your burnt out ones. But those aren't the real reasons its because "its easier to replace a couple of head lights then it is...... a daughter" BOOOOOOM!!! You now have to buy these headlights cause if you don't your ditsy daughter wont see shit and will crash and die!!! And there you have it, the "hidden-fear" approach, and we all thought this was just an innocent headlight commercial. I just love how this ad is trying to appeal to "all Americans" and convincing them to act upon their newly developed fear of the dark. I'm personally not a big fan of this type of fear inducing ad, using fear to control people is terrorism in my book. But we can call it fearism for disassociation purposes. It feels that since the whole 9/11 deal its gotten a lot worse.{(EDIT):I just watched all the ads on this site: http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1956, and this has been going on a long time, but the 92,96,00(forgive me i was 4,8,12 at the time...) elections focused on a lot of domestic stuff so it didn't have that war time feel like the 04 election did.} I'm pretty sure the greatest president we ever had once said, "The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself" Word.

In spite of how stupid I think this ad is, I do believe this add is very effective, for its target audience.(see title) The first time I saw it I couldn't contain my laughter, its just too easy to appeal to paternal fears in order to sell a product. We have all seen adds like this with a similar message, if you don't get this product your safety(or your child's in this case) is in danger! BUY IT NOW SO YOU CAN FEEL SAFE!!!!!

So what can we all learn from this advertisement? Well I can tell you what I learned, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of Americans. Ohh and if you gonna get some new headlights better make em silver stars, they are 50% brighter.