Current Advertising Campaign Critique

A recent ad campaign that has been extended beyond where most television spots are expected to is the "Walk-In Fridge" campaign for Heineken. The original spot appeared on television and viral video in 2009 and showed a group of women squeaking with joy over a walk-in closet full of shoes, but they stop when they realize they are being drowned out by their husbands who are downstairs yelling excitedly over a walk-in fridge lined with bottles of Heineken. The viral video got millions of views and the television ad was long-running. It also won a silver award in the 2009 Cannes Lions awards in the film category. In 2010 they continued the campaign with guerilla advertising in Amsterdam, which featured giant boxes labelled "walk-in fridge" beside dumpsters and being carried around by young men. This blurred the line between fiction and reality for the T.V. spot, and this trend continued with an actual walk-in fridge being installed by Heineken at a beer festival, where they allowed groups of friends to enter it and shoot their own viral video spoofing the original.
    The target market for these ads is males aged 21-35 who love beer and have a healthy social life. This is obvious as that is the target market for the majority of beer ad campaigns, but also because that is the type of person cast in the commercial and likely the same type of people participated in the viral video spoof campaign at the beer festival.
    A current cultural theme reflected in this commercial is the Western glorification of materialism reflected in shows such as Sex in the City. The commercial is basically pointing out that men can get excited over frivolous material things the same way women can, even if those frivolous things are very different from one another. It also reflects the recent trend of frat-like groups of grown men, or "bro-hood", which reflects manly qualities in banding together to do something as a group. This quality is strongly reflected in the campaign's latest T.V. spot, in which a group of friends work together to build a walk-in fridge, ending in hilarious results.
    What I see in this ad campaign is a cultural shift away from the idea that men should be independently strong and do things by themselves, moving into more of a brotherhood mentality similar to fraternities where grown men work together to accomplish goals, as trivial as they may be. I also see a shift in advertising that is moving away from the typical beer commercial that usually involves dancing women, a booming voiceover and beer being poured into a tall glass. Commercials such as this one and the Dos Equis campaign display a movement towards a storyline and subtext in beer commercials.

My Weekly Media Use

Two weeks ago our class was asked to track our individual media usage over one week and create and information graphic to represent it. My media use results didn't surprise me very much, except for my excessive text messaging. It really showed me the difference between having unlimited texting and paying 15 cents per text like I used to.
     I chose to split my media up into categories and group similar media in order to make it easier to draw quick comparisons. The pie charts all express the media categories that were tracking usage by hours, and the green blocks underneath most of the pie graphs give statistics on the media we were asked to track by frequency rather than hours. Each statistic is underneath a category it relates to, which adds more depth to the information than just the pie charts.